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war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions … It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Leader Motherhood Work
Marriage probably originated as a straightforward food-for-sex deal among foraging primates. Compatibility was not a big issue, nor, of course, was there any tension over who would control the remote.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Compatiblity Foraging Issue Sex
Marriage is socialism among two people.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Eugenics Marriage Two
America is addicted to wars of distraction.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Addict Distraction Madness War
At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Generosity Hate Love
We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Freedom Speech Weather
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
When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where … the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Children College Positive Thinking
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Black Facts Intellectual
Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Country Debt Medical Number
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
The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Cancer Disease Thinking
No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Chance Debt Hand
Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Class Distance War
Feminists have not tried to “destroy the family”. We just thought the family was such a good idea that men might want to get involved in it too.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Feminist Ideas Men
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?
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Government Jobs Motherhood

war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions … It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions … It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes