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That’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.

Barbara Ehrenreich

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
Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Clever Evolution Favors
A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Know Knowing Strength Weakness
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

Exercise Judging People Perform Power President
no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Jobs Matter Work
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

Alcohol Drug Views
Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, “Adoption, not Abortion,” although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Abortion Adoption Atheism
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?
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Bank Crowd Home Neighbour Swoop
The internet was supposed to make this whole business of job searching rational and simple. You could post your resume and companies would search them and they’d find you. It doesn’t seem to work that way. There aren’t enough jobs for experienced, college educated managers and professionals.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

College Jobs Simple
The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Men People Sex
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
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
The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Atheism Gun Party
For a long time on Earth humans didn’t worship good gods; that’s a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Ideas Long Powerful
The secret of the truly successful … is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Busy Secret Successful
An asteroid could hit us at any moment. This is not – and also, the most successful kind of life on this planet is not us, it’s microbes. They’re the ones who greatly outnumber us, and may eventually destroy us.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Asteroids May Successful

That’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.

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That’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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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