Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards, who won’t cry when she’s knocked to the ground while trying to board the six o clock Eastern shuttle, and whose schedule doesn’t allow for a sexual encounter lasting more than twelve minutes.
BARBARA EHRENREICHwe are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.
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Personally, 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.’
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Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.
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The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public ignominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.
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It’s a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. … Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated.
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We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles…bot h of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.
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Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
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Once you do lose a job, there are not a lot of social supports for you. You lose health insurance because we have this absurd system in America where health insurance is usually tied to employment. Your income dips. And that’s when you get into selling the house.
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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.
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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.
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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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Yes, I think especially the Pentecostal churches, you know, that there’s been such a growth in Pentecostalism. And it’s a rejection of the much more dour and barren kind of Calvinist worship and also, the very formal Catholic forms of worship.
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Wars produce warlike societies, which in turn make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone themselves.
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It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.
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Marriage is socialism among two people.
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The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce. It creates a lot of anger and emotional hardship. People may become quite depressed.
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There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.
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war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions … It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.
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Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers; think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.
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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.
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Every time a bank swoops down to snatch up a home, it should be met with a crowd of jeering, obstructive neighbors. And although this may be point 4.5, how about organizing a mass refusal to pay back student loans?
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So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.
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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.
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Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards.
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For anyone worn down, The Impossible Will Take a Little While is a bracing double cappuccino.
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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