Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes (1941-2022)

“No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”

“No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”

“No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”

“Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an "ethic."”

“At Wal-Mart, a co-worker once advised me that, although I had a lot to learn, it was also important not to "know too much," or at least never to reveal to one’s full abilities to management;…”

“From an entertainment point of view, the Solar System has been a bust. None of the planets turns out to have any real-estate potential, and most of them are probably even useless for filming Dune sequels.”

“Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it's intimate and psychological / resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.”

“Surely there must be some way to find a husband or, for that matter, merely an escort, without sacrificing one's privacy, self-respect, and interior decorating scheme. For example, men could be imported from the developing countries, many parts of which are suffering from a man excess, at least in relation to local food supply.”

“one of the American left's most brilliant and fearless women-a pioneer in the '30s and role model for activists in the '90s.”

“The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public igominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.”

“Her essays combine passion and moral clarity, anger and a steady commitment to having fun. Best of all, she channels the secret ecstatic undercurrents of late twentieth century American popular culture, which we need now more than ever.”

“Political activism is about what you do; a counterculture is about how you live and look at the world, and the two do not necessarily overlap at all. Thus, Jack Kerouac, the great countercultural of the '50s, was somewhat to the right of Joseph McCarthy; while Norman Thomas, the best-known socialist of the same decade, was as straight as Thomas E. Dewey.”

“So, Barbara once wrote, “In America, only the rich can afford to write about poverty.” And so, that meant you had, in the ’90s and the ’00s, columnists and pundits tossing off columns about so-called deadbeat dads detached from their second homes, right? What she wanted was she wanted to see people who were up close to the experience, who had — themselves either had grown up working poor or were still working in factories, and were professional journalists, as well. And also she wanted to see professional journalists spend weeks, months, years reporting from the frontlines of economic jeopardy. I think it’s really important to think of her as a journalist and an activist. She didn’t necessarily see the bright line that other kind of so-called great journalists tend to see, right? That in the mainstream media, you’re not supposed to have a take or an opinion or a voice. She thought the opposite was true, that you needed to have people who are able to speak truth to power contributing to all of the conversations. So, she was co-chair, actually, of the DSA in early years, and it’s really important to recognize that. She was also part of women’s movements, labor movements. She felt they went hand in hand with the kind of critical writing she did. They were not separate entities. She understood that, on a basic level, people just needed higher wages and more money, basically. And to make this into a moral or personal vendetta against the poor was an obscenity. And she dedicated much of her life to creating media around that”

“So much of this book (For Her Own Good) is so devastatingly informative and is written with such lucid feminist wit, that I kept waiting as I read for the basic proscription against lesbianism to be examined. It never was…"False consciousness" can, I agree, be used as a term of dismissal for any thinking we don't like or adhere to. But, as I tried to illustrate in some detail, there is a real, identifiable system of heterosexual propaganda, of defining women as existing for the sexual use of men, which goes beyond "sex role" or "gender" stereotyping or "sexist imagery" to include a vast number of verbal and nonverbal messages. And this I call "control of consciousness." The possibility of a woman who does not exist sexually for men-the lesbian possibility-is buried, erased, occluded, distorted, misnamed, and driven underground. The feminist books-Chodorow, Dinnerstein, Ehrenreich and English, and others-which I discuss at the beginning of my essay contribute to this invalidation and erasure, and as such are part of the problem.”