In matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended. You may try to project a thoroughly positive outlook in order to attract a potential boyfriend, but you are also advised to Google him.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens, walk on through and at least take a look around.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Most accounts of mystical experiences... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be "living" or alive, as in "living God." But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose?

— Barbara Ehrenreich

My death is incidental, and I worry very much about my loved ones and, you know, would like to make it as easy as possible for them. Or wish I could, will away whatever, you know, the sadness they will feel when I die. But for me, nothing. The world goes on.

— Barbara Ehrenreich