Even when uttered by Democrats, “middle class” often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, “Us, and not them,” where “them” includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.
BARBARA EHRENREICHThat’s free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing – the truly democratic thing about it – is that you don’t even have to be a player to lose.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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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.
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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.
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If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn’t give a damn.
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War cannot be used as a means to prevent or abolish wars. … The idea of a war to prevent war is one of its oldest, and cruelest, tricks.
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Marriage is socialism among two people.
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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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The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.
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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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To live in poverty is to live with constant uncertainty, to accept galling indignities, and to expect harassment by the police, welfare officials and employers, as well as by others who are poor and desperate.
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Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
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It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.
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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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Every time a bank swoops down to snatch up a home, it should be met with a crowd of jeering, obstructive neighbors. And although this may be point 4.5, how about organizing a mass refusal to pay back student loans?
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Once you do lose a job, there are not a lot of social supports for you. You lose health insurance because we have this absurd system in America where health insurance is usually tied to employment. Your income dips. And that’s when you get into selling the house.
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The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
BARBARA EHRENREICH






