There seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making urine tests a condition for employment — anywhere.
BARBARA EHRENREICHCall 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.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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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.
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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 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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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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America is addicted to wars of distraction.
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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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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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Employers have gone away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to a new notion that they are disposable.
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Racist, sexist, and homophobic thoughts cannot, alas, be abolished by fiat but only by the time-honored methods of persuasion, education and exposure to the other guy’s-or excuse me, woman’s-point of view.
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In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory — horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene — and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.
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Anyone who has invented a better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.
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Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.
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In 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.
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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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No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.
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No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
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Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying… We’ve shopped till we dropped alright, face down on the floor.
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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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Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.
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The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.
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Consider the standard two-person married couple. … They will share a VCR, a microwave, etc. This is not a matter of ideology or even personal inclination. It is practically the definition of marriage. Marriage is socialism among two people.
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James Bond in his Sean Connery days … was the first well-known bachelor on the American scene who was not a drifter or a degenerate and did not eat out of cans.
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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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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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There’s more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.
BARBARA EHRENREICH