Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Even when uttered by Democrats, middle class often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, Us, and not them, where them includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Way
Tongue
Uttered
Like
Saying
Tongues
People
Middle
Snake
Class
Snakes
Poor
Includes
Sound
Democrats
Often
Democrat
Handlers
Even
Sounds
Pierced
More quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich
Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we've made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we've loved it to death.
Barbara Ehrenreich
There seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making urine tests a condition for employment -- anywhere.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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
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
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
The secret of the truly successful ... is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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
When someone works for less pay than she can live on - when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently - then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.
Barbara Ehrenreich
For a long time on Earth humans didn't worship good gods that's a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
Barbara Ehrenreich
But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Whether you work outside the home or not, never tell them [your children] that being a mommy is your 'job.' Being a mommy is a relationship, not a profession.
Barbara Ehrenreich
The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs
Barbara Ehrenreich
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
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
The war with Iraq ... had to be one of the greatest non sequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that.
Barbara Ehrenreich
I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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
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
