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.
BARBARA EHRENREICHTake motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.
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 -
The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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 -
Roman Catholicism: a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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.
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 -
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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 -
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Experimental science is fascinating, but I don’t want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I’ll read about it.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
There’s more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH