Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we’ve made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we’ve loved it to death.
BARBARA EHRENREICHThe Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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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 someone works for less pay than she can live on – when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently – then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.
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Call it ‘nationalism’ when you affix a flag to your car, and leave the word ‘patriotism’ for your efforts to make this country a kinder, more egalitarian place, and one that is less dangerous to the rest of the world.
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A cynic might conclude that the real purpose of the $500 million-a-year implant business is the implantation of fat in the bellies and rumps of underemployed plastic surgeons.
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The secret of the truly successful … is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.
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Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.
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the fastest-growing brand of religion is of the magical ‘name it and claim it’ variety, in which the deity exists only to meet one’s immediate, self-identified needs.
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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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You still don’t like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend, the economist Julianne Malveaux, says: Don’t marry a gay person. Case closed, problem solved.
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What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the ‘negative people’ from one’s life [as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney]? It might be a good idea to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager.
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In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.
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My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan’s life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.
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The urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.” –Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.
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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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Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards.
BARBARA EHRENREICH