Quotes from Arlie Russell Hochschild

The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel—happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice.

If, in 2010, you lived in a county with a higher exposure to toxic pollution, we discovered, you are more likely to believe that Americans "worry too much" about the environment and to believe that the United States is doing "more than enough" about it. You are also more likely to describe yourself as a strong Republican.

Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don't know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.

We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the "other" side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it's on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin.

Many workers in the petrochemical plants were conservative Republicans and avid hunters and fishers and felt caught in a terrible bind. They loved their magnificent wilderness. They remembered it as children. They knew it and respect it as sportsmen. But their jobs were in industries that polluted--often legally--this same wilderness.

Blacks, women, immigrants, refugees, brown pelicans—all have cut ahead of you in line. But it's people like you who have made this country great. You feel uneasy. It has to be said: the line cutters irritate you. They are violating rules of fairness. You resent them, and you feel it's right that you do. So do your friends. Fox commentators reflect your feelings, for your deep story is also the Fox News deep story.

The more at risk a person is to exposure to hazardous waste, nationwide, we discovered, the less likely a person was to be worried about it, and the more likely to be a conservative Republican.

A political campaign has a central place in the cultural life of a people. It tells citizens what issues powerful people think are worth hearing about.

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing,

Tea Party advocates work in or run small businesses. Yet the politicians they support back laws that consolidate the monopoly power of the very largest companies that are poised to swallow up smaller ones.

The Righteous Mind, for example, Jonathan Haidt

Instead of the country agreeing with her community on the natural rightness of heterosexual marriage as the center of family life, she was now obliged to defend herself against the idea that these views were sexist, homophobic, old-fashioned, and backward.

Part of the psychological program is that people think they're free when they're not," he said. "A company may be free to pollute, but that means the people aren't free to swim.

Local waterways had long been contaminated from many sources. But in 1987, the state at last issued a seafood advisory for Bayou d'Inde, the Calcasieu Ship Channel, and the estuary to the Gulf of Mexico. ... From net to plate—fishermen, grocery stores, trucking companies, and restaurant workers—all were furious at the government officials who had declared the seafood advisory.

Templet refers me to a 1992 study by the MIT political scientist Stephen Meyer, who rated the fifty states according to the strictness of their environmental protection. Meyer then matched regulatory strictness to economic growth over a twenty-year period and found that the tougher the regulation, the more jobs were available in the economy.

If love is a precious resource, it is not one simply extracted from the Third World and implanted in the First; rather, it owes its very existence to a particular cultural alchemy that occurs in the land to which it is imported.

In a racially separated world, it's possible to have racial disadvantage without racial prejudice. Whites can turn for help to white neighbors with good connections in the plant. Blacks turn to black neighbors without them.

The stock image of the early twentieth century, the "Negro" minstrel, a rural simpleton, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich notes, has now been upgraded, whitened, and continued in such television programs as Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

Left or right, we all happily use plastic combs, toothbrushes, cell phones, and cars, but we don't all pay for it with high pollution. As research for this book shows, red states pay for it more—partly through their own votes for easier regulation and partly through their exposure to a social terrain of politics, industry, television channels, and a pulpit that invites them to do so. In one way, people in blue states have their cake and eat it too, while many in red states have neither.

In the life of one man, Lee Sherman, I saw reflected both sides of the Great Paradoz--the need for help and a principled refusal of it.

Given such an array of challenges, one might expect people to welcome federal help. In truth, a very large proportion of the yearly budgets---in the case of Louisiana, 44 percent---do come from federal funds…

But Republicans put God and family on their side and 'we like that. The Scripture says Jesus wants us to be about his Father's business.' Their faith had guided them through a painful loss of family, friends, neighbors, frogs, turtles, and trees [from the pollution left by petrochemical companies in Louisiana's Cancer Alley].

racism refers to the belief in a natural hierarchy that places blacks at the bottom, and the tendency of whites to judge their own worth by distance from that bottom.

They had children to take care of and felt wary of supporting any environmental movement or federal government action that might jeopardize them.