Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

Poverty is ever an inbred growth

The real people who suffer when business is leaving or not successful are the people in the middle class.

America stands as a beacon of hope and the possibility of a better life - but it is also a nation where nearly 1 in 4 children live in poverty.

When journalists and politicians speak of a dwindling middle class that's under economic assault and a poor community that's getting bigger, they're talking about Ferguson. Independent of the racial demographics and dynamics of Ferguson, Missouri, there's a 'Ferguson' near you.

The middle class has disappeared. We have a highway to poverty and no roads coming out.

You don't have to be impoverished to understand poverty.

… the struggling masses

There’s been an economic war going on in this country and the middle class and the poor have been losing..

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

Income inequality has become so prevalent in the U.S. that examples of its negative impact on the middle class are as common as Kanye West saying something cringeworthy in the media.

Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

I lived for two years in an abandoned gas station with no running water and no electricity after my parents got divorced and my stepdad couldn't get a job. So I think a lot about families like mine who were middle class and struggled. So that experience really drives my philosophy.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

My background's working class. My parents had to work to make ends meet. We don't come from any sense of privilege.

Millions of people are falling out of the middle class into the ranks of the poor.

Poverty doesn't imply necessarily violence.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

The working poor is a growing population in this country.

Poverty is an open-mouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

Poverty fills armies, mans navies.

A rising tide lifts all boats but if you can’t afford a boat, the tide goes up your nose.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves