Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

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Barbara Ehrenreich

Profession : Writer

Birth : August 26, 1941

It was a very big principle in my upbringing that you should respect everybody's work. The street sweeper. Everybody. You should never look down on anybody for their work.

Barbara Ehrenreich

The religions that fascinate me and, you know, could possibly tempt me are not the ones that involve faith or belief. They're the ones that offer you the opportunity to know the spirit or deity.

Barbara Ehrenreich

When I was 13, I had these episodes where I could just see the world without any words attached to it, without any associations. It was a little bit spooky. A lot of people might have even thought it was pathological. I thought it was interesting.

Barbara Ehrenreich

I've spent so many years talking about poverty and economic justice, I'm strongly tempted to get biblical. Jesus' teachings are so radical; they're just insanely generous and apocalyptic. Christians become more fascinated by the dead Jesus. They don't like the living Jesus.

Barbara Ehrenreich

If I get incensed about some injustice, you can't make me - I will not just going to sit at my desk, at my computer all the time. I - I might want to march out on that.

Barbara Ehrenreich

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.

Barbara Ehrenreich

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.

Barbara Ehrenreich

My parents were atheists, strong atheists. I never got the answer 'God.'

Barbara Ehrenreich

If there is something I am arguing, it is a critique of science. Science has consistently denied the existence of consciousness other than human. Only in the last 20 years do we have acknowledgement of animal feeling or culture or experience.

Barbara Ehrenreich

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.

Barbara Ehrenreich

I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.'

Barbara Ehrenreich

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.

Barbara Ehrenreich

I routinely oscillate between exultation and despair. Maybe at the end of the day I feel pretty good about what I've written, but the next morning I see that it's crap. Then I start again - make a new outline, do some more research, try to rethink the whole question.

Barbara Ehrenreich