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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

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

Clever Evolution Favors
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
My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan’s life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Dirt Kind Matter
America is addicted to wars of distraction.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Addict Distraction Madness War
So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Energetic Happiness Test Upbeat
To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals.”
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Born Country Homeless
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
For anyone worn down, The Impossible Will Take a Little While is a bracing double cappuccino.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Bracing Cappuccino Impossible Little
What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re really selling is your life.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Hour Realizing Selling
Marriage is socialism among two people.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Eugenics Marriage Two
Yes. I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Benefits Pay Thinking
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 EHRENREICH

Class People Snakes
When someone works for less pay than she can live on – when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently – then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Example Pay Sacrifice
The Republicans hardly need a party and the cumbersome cadre of low-level officials that form one; they have a bankroll as large as the Pentagon’s budget, dozens of fatted PACs, and the well-advertised support of the Christian deity.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Christian Level Low Official Party Support
The secret of the truly successful … is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Busy Secret Successful
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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