Quotes from Barbara Ehrenreich

When I was 17, I had an experience that I later learned could be called a 'mystical experience.' It was almost violent. No faces, voices, nothing like that. It is like the world burst and flamed into life all around me. That is not a great image, but it is as good as I will ever do.

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.

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.

I didn't want to be an author; I wanted to be a scientist. Not that I didn't love literature, but I couldn't distinguish it from reading, and reading was already my default activity, almost like breathing.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

I went into science, ending up with a Ph.D. in cell biology, but along the way I found out that experimental science involves many hours and days and nights of laboratory work, which is a lot like washing dishes, only a little more challenging. I was too impatient, and maybe a little too sloppy, for it.

Well, I certainly wouldn't want to live in the 18th century myself, or the 19th either, for that matter.

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.

Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch.

You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.

No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.

Money does not bring happiness' - only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.

Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.

If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever has to be done has to be done by us.

If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn't give a damn.

That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing - the truly democratic thing about it - is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.

Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.

I'm interested in what bonds people together. You know, what brings us together in good ways? And there's not a lot known about that.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

We - we spend a lot of time, scholarly time, thinking about love and sex, but very little about the - the kind of joy that can take over a crowd of people or a group of people, in festivity, in ecstatic ritual of some kind, in celebration.

the fastest-growing brand of religion is of the magical 'name it and claim it' variety, in which the deity exists only to meet one's immediate, self-identified needs.

Our atheism family tradition is traced to a - I don't know if it was great-great or a great-great-great grandmother who was a poor Irish-American woman in the 1880s in western Montana.

There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.