Barbara Quotes

We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women-whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.

People may find it more comfortable to listen to us if we equivocate, but in the long run only words that discomfort them are going to change our situation.

I learned always to trust my own deep sense of what I should do, and not just obediently trust the judgment of others - even others better than I am.

Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.

Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.

there is clearly a kind of anger that is healthy. It is the concentration of one's whole being in the determination: this must change.

Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.

People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.

It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.

To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.

We cannot live without our lives

All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.

The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.

What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your life.

I'm not a nice person.

Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.

When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.

war is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things.

People tend to judge presidents on how the economy performs, and yet we don't expect them to have the power to do much about it. Or we don't want them to exercise that power, if they were to have it.

Feminists have not tried to "destroy the family". We just thought the family was such a good idea that men might want to get involved in it too.

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.

Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.

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.

A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America

When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where ... the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.

Experimental science is fascinating, but I don't want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I'll read about it.

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems.

Yes. I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices.

The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.

while everything else in our lives has gotten simpler, speedier, more microwavable and user-friendly, child-raising seems to have expanded to fill the time no longer available for it.

James Bond in his Sean Connery days ... was the first well-known bachelor on the American scene who was not a drifter or a degenerate and did not eat out of cans.

But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress." --Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.

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.

War cannot be used as a means to prevent or abolish wars. ... The idea of a war to prevent war is one of its oldest, and cruelest, tricks.

Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.

Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much.

Even when uttered by Democrats, "middle class" often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, "Us, and not them," where "them" includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.

If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other peoples, then that must feel pretty good.

Wars produce warlike societies, which in turn make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone themselves.

Ineluctably, the insults inflicted in one war call forth new wars of retaliation, which may be waged within months of the original conflict or generations later.

So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.

The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.

Reality... includes a perceiver, who has memories, thoughts, desires, emotions - [which] a normal camera tends to omit.

I'd like to meet a lovely man who shares my interests. On the other hand, I possibly will not. It's part of the hand you're dealt. It's a challenge-and I'm not atypical.

Poetry is very crafted. You can't have too many words. It needs compression. It has to be spare, just the right number of words.

I love writing. I've always written journals. I loved writing the book on living alone.

Alcohol was the background color in the fabric of Reggie's life.

I am guilty of using dollar signs as proof of a work of art's longevity.