Barbara Ehrenreich - Poverty Quotes

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In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s... the peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge, with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.

Barbara Ehrenreich
Frontline battle troops, most of whom have been in the military for about a year, earn about $17,000 a year — which puts them at about the level of theater ushers and crossing guards.... If supporting our troops is to mean something more than a bumper sticker, the least we could do is lift them out of poverty.

Barbara Ehrenreich
Poverty is not... a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.

Barbara Ehrenreich
If low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace — and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well — you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.

Barbara Ehrenreich
The 'discovery' of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the 'discovery' of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

Barbara Ehrenreich
To live in poverty is to live with constant uncertainty, to accept galling indignities, and to expect harassment by the police, welfare officials, and employers, as well as by others who are poor and desperate.

Barbara Ehrenreich
Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.

Barbara Ehrenreich