If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other peoples, then that must feel pretty good.
BARBARA EHRENREICHNo matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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People tend to judge presidents on how the economy performs, and yet we don’t expect them to have the power to do much about it. Or we don’t want them to exercise that power, if they were to have it.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Yes. I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Personally, I can’t see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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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The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Ineluctably, the insults inflicted in one war call forth new wars of retaliation, which may be waged within months of the original conflict or generations later.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.
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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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH






