Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.
BARBARA EHRENREICHIn economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shite fundamentalists.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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I think it’s tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.
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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.
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Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of ‘traditional values’ installed. … the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.
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Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production – only to produce a race of bed-wetters!
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Whether you work outside the home or not, never tell them [your children] that being a mommy is your ‘job.’ Being a mommy is a relationship, not a profession.
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we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.
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it used to be almost the first question (just after ‘Can you type?’) in the standard female job interview: ‘Are you now, or have you ever, contemplated marriage, motherhood, or the violent overthrow of the U.S. government?
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I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that’s really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it’s very different. You’re out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn’t that fascinating.
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Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.
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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.
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Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.
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What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re really selling is your life.
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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 I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
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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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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.
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no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled.
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I’m not a nice person.
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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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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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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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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.
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Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
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So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.
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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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Marriage is socialism among two people.
BARBARA EHRENREICH