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Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

American Political figure

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Famous Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

“As he speaks, his eyes slither warily from one of us to another, reminding me of the Time Warner executives I once lunched with years ago, who seemed poised at all times between arrogance and deference, nervously calculating which to project. A line from a Robert Lowell poem comes to mind: “a savage servility/slides by on grease.”

PoetryBusinessArroganceExecutivesSavageryDeferenceServilityRobert Lowell
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“[Networking] feels fake because we know it involves the deflection of our natural human sociability to an ulterior end. Normally we meet strangers in the expectation that they may truly be strange, and are drawn to the multilayered mystery that each human presents. But in networking, as in prostitution, there is no time for fascination. The networker is always, so to speak, looking over the shoulder of the person she engages in conversation, toward whatever concrete advantage can be gleaned from the interaction—a tip or a precious contact.”

InterestConversationConnectionNetworkingSociabilityAdvantagesJob Hunting
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“Inadvertently, I had stumbled across what has been called the Harvard law of animal behavior, which is related to Murphy's law: "You can have the most beautifully designed experiment with the most carefully controlled variables, and the animal will do what it damn well pleases.”

AnimalAnimal BehaviorMurphy S LawHarvard Law
Book:Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
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“Any dictatorship takes a psychological toll on its subjects. If you are treated as an untrustworthy person-a potential slacker, drug addict, or thief-you may begin to feel less trust worthy yourself. If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules, you begin to accept that unfortunate status. To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals-rats and monkeys, for example-that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming "depressed" in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains. And-what is especially relevant here-they avoid fighting even in self-defense. Humans are, of course, vastly more complicated; even in situations of extreme subordination, we can pump up our self-esteem with thoughts of our families, our religion, our hopes for the future. But as much as any other social animal, and more so than many, we depend for our self-image on the humans immediately around us-to the point of altering our perceptions of the world so as to fit in with theirs. My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers - the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being "reamed out" by managers - are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth. It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism. Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a halt. That is not my impression. While I encountered some cynics and plenty of people who had learned to budget their energy, I never met an actual slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief. On the contrary, I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or in recognition. Often, in fact, these people experienced management as an obstacle to getting the job done as it should be done.”

JournalismWork EthicMinimum WageWork QuotesLiving WageUndercoverLabor QuotesGetting ByDignity Of Labor
Book:Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
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“I smoke. It's expensive. It's also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It's a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed.”

TiredSmokeRelaxationStimulant
Book:Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
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“But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.”

Religion
Book:Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
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“Poor whites had always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating. That slender assurance is shrinking.”

Poor WhitesRacial Subjugation
Book:Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
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“Sometimes Carlie hands me the squirt bottle of "Bam" (an acronym for something that begins, ominously, with "butyric" - the rest of it has been worn off the label) and lets me do the bathrooms. No service ethic challenges me here to new heights of performance. I just concentrate on removing the pubic hairs from the bathtubs, or at least the dark ones that I can see.”

BathroomPubic
Book:Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
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“Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the "team". And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.”

MotivationalBusinessCapitalismCorporationsDownsizingCorporatismJobseekingFlexploitation
Book:Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
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“I think of my father, whose personality traits included brash, cynical, bombastic, obnoxious, charming, kindly, and falling-down drunk, yet who managed to rise from the copper mines of Butte to the corporate stratosphere, ending up as vice president of research for a multinational firm. Did he ever take a personality test or submit to executive coaching? Or were things different in the fifties and sixties, with a greater emphasis on what you could actually do?”

SuccessWorkBusinessPersonalityCharacteristicsCoachingTraitsFathersPersonality TraitsPersonality Tests
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“But ecstatic rituals are also good, and expressive of our artistic temperament and spiritual yearnings as well as our solidarity. So how can civilization be regarded as a form of progress if it precludes something as distinctively human, and deeply satisfying, as the collective joy of festivities and ecstatic rituals? In a remarkable essay titled "The Decline of the Choral Dance," Paul Halmos wrote in 1952 that the ancient and universal tradition of the choral dance - meaning the group dance, as opposed to the relative recent, European - derived practice of dancing in couples - was an expression of our "group-ward drives" and "biological sociality." Hence its disappearance within complex societies, and especially within industrial civilization, can only represent a "decline of our biosocial life" - a painfully disturbing conclusion.”

SocietyCivilizationDanceRitual
Book:Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
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“Costuming serves different, even opposite, functions for different people. For most, the wearing of team colors allows a fan to blend in with a mass of other similarly clad fans; it would be unwise to flout the color coding by inadvertently wearing the opponent's colors while sitting in a section of the bleachers occupied by home team fans. But for others, costuming - and in some cases, uncostuming, as with the Yalies who run naked through the stadium at the annual Harvard-Yale game - is a valid, some might say exhibitionist, bid for attention.”

CommunityDanceRitualFestivalCostume
Book:Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
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“At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.”

WorldHumansHas BeensHardIndividualGivenTechnologyIssuesDependsProtectSurvivalCommitmentAssumingSpeciesFloatsRelentlessPierceReassuranceOmenEmpiricismKnowledge Of The WorldBison
Book:Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
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“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 one's full abilities to management, because "the more they think you can do, the more they'll use you and abuse you." My mentors in these matters were not lazy; they just understood that there are few or no rewards for heroic performance. The trick lies in figuring out how to budget your energy so there'll be some left over for the next day.”

ThinkingKnowsImportantMatterUseLyingNextEnergyLeftCan DoAbilityToo MuchUnderstoodPerformancesAbuseManagementRewardsWorkersTricksBudgetsLazyHeroicMentorNext DayCo Worker
Author:Barbara Ehrenreich
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“The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower.”

KindReasonLanguageCostSpeechOvercomingVery GoodTongueCirclesSophisticatedSnakesWillpowerAvoidedForeignersImpedimentsForeign LanguagePreludeSpeaking In TonguesSpeech Impediment
Book:WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES
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“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.”

KnowsImportantHardExampleRight NowImportant ThingsThings To DoLunchRecallsCultMobile
Book:WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES
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“Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores. ... But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.”

WorldYearsWarCultureClassMiddleCarPossibilityIndustryMajorsTwentiesRadioCrowdsFollowingStoresAdvertisingConsumersWar Of The WorldsMiddle ClassHistorianAdsWorld War IiWorld War IConsumerismAmerican CultureConsumer Culture
Book:FEAR OF FALLING
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“In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s ... [t]he peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge, with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.”

ProcessWealthWhiteClassPovertyMiddleGrewHigherShadowDearCloudsRisingMiddle ClassBroadsValleysPerpetualHolding OnRising UpLedgesDear Life
Book:Going to Extremes: Notes from a Divided Nation
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“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.”

ThinkingNeedsDreamDesireUniverseWishOptimismCome UpRealizationGloriousThinkerWishful ThinkingAuroraPositive Thinker
Book:Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
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“One of the most essential and mundane of human activities - taking care of children - requires high levels of anxious vigilance. ... [Parents] dare not risk assuming that the sudden quiet from the toddlers' room means they are studying with Baby Einstein. Visualize fratricidal stranglings and electric outlets stabbed with forks: this is how we have reproduced our genomes.”

HumansMeanChildrenCareParentLevelsRoomsStudyRiskBabyActivityQuietEssentialsAssumingDareAnxiousElectricOutletsMundaneForksHigh LevelHuman ActivityVigilanceToddlerGenomeStrangling
Author:Barbara Ehrenreich
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“By the Reagan era, the 'culture of poverty' had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused not by low wages or a lack of jobs but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to 'defer gratification' or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money.”

JobsLastsCulturePoorAttitudePovertyCrimeLowsAddictionConservativeLifestyleIdeologyErasClockTrustedWagesGratificationAlarmsCornerstonesBad AttitudePromiscuousAlarm Clocks
Author:Barbara Ehrenreich
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“I realize that after decades of positive thinking the notion of realism, of things as they are, may seem a little quaint. ... When the stakes are high enough and the risks obvious, we still turn to people who can be counted on to understand those risks and prepare for worst-case scenarios. A chief of state does not want to hear a general in the field say that he 'hopes' to win tomorrow's battle or that he's 'visualizing victory'.”

PeopleThinkingWantMayLittlesDoeStillsStatesEnoughRealitySeemsTurnsWinningRealizingCasesRiskWorstFieldsPositive ThinkingVictoryTomorrowBattleNotionObviousDecadesChiefsStakesRealismScenariosWishful ThinkingQuaintVisualizingWorst Case Scenario
Book:Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
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“the seeker who embraces positive theology finds ... that you can have all that stuff in the mall, as well as the beautiful house and car, if only you believe that you can. But ... if you don't have all that you want, if you feel sick, discouraged, or defeated, you have only yourself to blame. Positive theology ratifies and completes a world without beauty, transcendence, or mercy.”

IfsWorldWantFeelsBelieveWellsBeautifulHouseStuffCarMercySickBlameEmbraceTheologyDefeatedDiscouragedTranscendenceSeekersMallsDefeated You
Author:Barbara Ehrenreich
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