Quotes from Barbara Ehrenreich

I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics. This required no great acting skill beyond the effort to appear unperturbed in the face of the inexplicable, which is as far as I can see one of the central tasks of adulthood.

But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules - the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called primitive societies - with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as a kind of incest taboo.

We do not look into mirrors, for example, to see our true selves, but to see what others are seeing, and what passes for inner reflection is often an agonizing assessment of how others are judging us.

Somehow human authority is never enough; we must have special effects.

Much of my rebelliousness starts with indifference to what is urgently important to others.

Purge everyone who "brings you down," and you risk being very lonely or, what is worse, cut off from reality.

The advice that you must change your environment—for example, by eliminating negative people and news—is an admission that there may in fact be a "real world" out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only "positive" response is to withdraw into one's own carefully constructed world of constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people.

In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.

Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don't need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.

So great was the witches' knowledge that in 1527, Paracelsus, considered the "father of modern medicine," burned his text on pharmaceuticals, confessing that he "had learned from the Sorceress all he knew.

I had discovered that writing--with whatever instrument--was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do.

you can't go around telling people, 'I'm on a mission to discover the purpose of life.' Not if you're hoping to prolong the conversation.

As far as I can see, even now, after years of puzzling over the field of cognitive science, there is no clear line between entities to which science attributes mind and those it regards as mindless mechanisms.

We were not supposed to know anything about our own bodies or to participate in decision-making about our own care.

A man who is a good lover to his wife is his children's best friend.… Child care is play to a woman who is happy. And only a man can make a woman happy. In deepest truth, a father's first duty to his children is to make their mother feel fulfilled as a woman.

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.

mostly I saw her efforts to induct me into adulthood much as a calf might see its mother's explanations of veal: I was being recruited into the great death march of biology—be born, reproduce, die.

Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life.

The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must because you didn't try hard enough, didn't believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success.

America has historically offered space for all sorts of sects, cults, faith healers, and purveyors of snake oil, and those that are profitable, like positive thinking, tend to flourish.

Very often in a classroom or a conversation I feel like yelling, 'What difference does it make?' Because 94% of my life is occupied with utter trivia. Much of my rebelliousness starts with indifference to what is urgently important to others.

Get up and make notes on the books that you have, reflect on these notes and order more books, get up again, revise the hypothesis, and figure out a new plan of action. Repeat, making sure to leave no cracks open through which the gray fog of depression can penetrate.

That's what science is about: seeing the exact same things that other people do, finding the units of measurement with which to describe those things, communicating in the fewest and most precise words available. What could be saner—or more sociable—than that?

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.