Quote

The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress. --Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Barbara Ehrenreich
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: August 26
American Political Figure
Essayist
Historian
Immunologist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Peace Activist
Politician
Writer
Butte
Montana
Appearance
Barbara
Dancing
Suppress
Embrace
Mock
Dance
Strangers
Streets
Urge
Powerful
Transform
Perfect
Urges
Easy
Stranger
Outdoors

More quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

Image
No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
I don't know when the cult of conspicuous busyness began, but it has swept up almost all the upwardly mobile, professional women I know. Already, it is getting hard to recall the days when, for example, 'Let's have lunch' meant something other than 'I've got more important things to do than talk to you right now.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
Well, the first thing that clued me in to the fact that there was something really scary about breast cancer, way beyond the thought of dying, was coming across an ad in the newspaper for pink breast cancer teddy bears. I am not that afraid of dying, but I am terrified of dying with a pink teddy bear under my arm.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
war is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
It's a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. ... Dreams go out and fulfill themselves wishes need only to be articulated.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
James Bond in his Sean Connery days ... was the first well-known bachelor on the American scene who was not a drifter or a degenerate and did not eat out of cans.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don't understand how she can go so long without food. Well, I don't understand how you can go so long without a cigarette, she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others smoking is what you do for yourself.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
Consider the standard two-person married couple. ... They will share a VCR, a microwave, etc. This is not a matter of ideology or even personal inclination. It is practically the definition of marriage. Marriage is socialism among two people.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
The money that fueled the explosion of gluttony at the top had to come from somewhere or, more specifically, from someone. Since no domestic oil deposits had been discovered, no new seams of uranium or gold, and since the war in Iraq enriched only the military contractors and suppliers, it had to come from other Americans.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Image
Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.
Barbara Ehrenreich