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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

The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Circles Overcoming Snakes
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
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Absurd Health House Job Jobs Once Support
You still don’t like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend, the economist Julianne Malveaux, says: Don’t marry a gay person. Case closed, problem solved.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Gay Ideas Problem
The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Facts Our Poor Society
Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

America Class Thinking
Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Cards Men Play
There’s more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Perky Pressure
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 I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Blue Father Montana
America is addicted to wars of distraction.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Addict Distraction Madness War
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
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
Wars produce warlike societies, which in turn make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone themselves.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Produce War World
in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm – a bland and neutral mainstream – from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Class Taken White
For the millions of us who live glued to computer keyboards at work and TV monitors at home, food may be more than entertainment. It may be the only sensual experience left.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Food Home Sensual

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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