The secret of the truly successful … is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.
BARBARA EHRENREICHPersonally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don’t happen to think it’s an appropriate subject for an ‘ethic.’
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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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.
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At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.
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The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.
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The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower.
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From an entertainment point of view, the Solar System has been a bust. None of the planets turns out to have any real-estate potential, and most of them are probably even useless for filming Dune sequels.
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Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
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That’s free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing – the truly democratic thing about it – is that you don’t even have to be a player to lose.
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An asteroid could hit us at any moment. This is not – and also, the most successful kind of life on this planet is not us, it’s microbes. They’re the ones who greatly outnumber us, and may eventually destroy us.
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If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever has to be done has to be done by us.
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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.
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We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
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Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women’s liberation… none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
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Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world.
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Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
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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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH