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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.

Barbara Ehrenreich

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!
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Business Ocean Race
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Divorce Emotional Jobs
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

Love People Television Watches World
For anyone worn down, The Impossible Will Take a Little While is a bracing double cappuccino.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Bracing Cappuccino Impossible Little
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

People Roles Unique
The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Cancer Disease Thinking
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

Conversation Men Minutes
But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Culture Fire Shapes
If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever has to be done has to be done by us.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Atheism Done Evidence God
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

Class Country Feminist Movement Vigorous
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Coercion Long Men
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

Dream Optimism Thinking
I’m not a nice person.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Nice Person Oversmart Think
The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Chance Fairs Political
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 EHRENREICH

Attitude Essence Spiritual
Marriage is socialism among two people.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Eugenics Marriage Two

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes