Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

When you grow up in a city like Boston, where I grew up, a lot of kids became criminals or cops. I never really had a bad take on cops other than I hate when there's one behind me on the highway.

It does us no harm to look over our past shortcomings and plan to improve our characters and actions in the coming year

Every era demands its own answers, and if one wants to do good, one must be prepared for them.

In the eyes of the true believer, people who have no holy cause are without backbone and character.

To be enthusiastic about doing much with human nature is a foolish business indeed

… the field of action is not the field of intellect, it is the field of character; and change or development of character is always slow work.

When I was in college, I lived in a mostly black, poor neighborhood. That's where I grew up, but I attended a mostly white upper-class school in conservative Mississippi. I was often very aware of how I presented myself.

I'm from the inner city of Buffalo.

Black and white is so familiar. It's how we see the printed word in books, so it's kind of neutral in a way. Yet it's ironic that black and white is so charged socially, what with its association with race.

With Othello, Shakespeare posed this problem of a black man in a white society in the role that he's playing. And Shakespeare gave Othello such dignity - he came not from - as he said - not from hate but from honor, from a sense of his own human dignity. And to me, to my mind, there could be no greater character played.

It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same.

Values are like fingerprints. Nobody's are the same, but you leave 'em all over everything you do

Race is not, and will not be an issue in this case.

People don't really change. Not fundamentally. When they surprise us, it is because we failed to recognize their potentialities.

The rich man has his motorcar, His country and his town estate, He smokes a fifty-cent cigar And jeers at Fate. He frivols through the livelong day, He knows not Poverty, her pinch. His lot seems light, his heart seems gay; He has a cinch. Yet though my lamp burns low and dim, Though I must slave for livelihood- Think you that I would change with him? You bet I would!

A modern theory of knowledge which takes account of the relational as distinct from the merely relative character of all historical knowledge must start with the assumption that there are spheres of thought in which it is impossible to conceive of absolute truth existing independently of the values and position of the subject and unrelated to the social context.

I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I'm interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it's what I'm interested in, and it's how I believe human behavior is legible.

The hammer and the anvil are the two hemispheres of every true reformer's character.

Happiness is not the end of life: character is.

Since the things we do determine the character of life, no blessed person can become unhappy. For he will never do those things which are hateful and petty.

There's a fashion, or maybe you could call it a necessity, in French cinema to make social films, which is to say films in which the characters are defined by their social context.

Never say any man is hopeless, because he only represents a character, a bundle of habits, which can be checked by new and better ones. Character is repeated habits, and repeated habits alone can reform character.

I think there's a racial outcome to a lot of what goes in America, but I don't think race is always the reason.

When I think about [characters], I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that's how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what's interesting about us happens in the context of other people.

Another feature of the prevailing vision is that the anointed must try to change the fundamental character of their fellow human beings, to make them more like themselves. Thus phrases about “raising the consciousness” of others, making them “aware,” or hoping that they will “grow.” In other words, the anointed must not only design a different social world from that which exists, they must people that world with different creatures, custom-made for the purpose.