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The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Racist, sexist, and homophobic thoughts cannot, alas, be abolished by fiat but only by the time-honored methods of persuasion, education and exposure to the other guy’s-or excuse me, woman’s-point of view.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Guy Tolerance Views
We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles…bot h of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

First Positive Thinking Struggle
The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Chance Fairs Political
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
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
We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Feminism Needs Women
There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Courage Difference Positive Thinking
Whether you work outside the home or not, never tell them [your children] that being a mommy is your ‘job.’ Being a mommy is a relationship, not a profession.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Children Home Job Mother
That’s the really neat thing about Dan Quayle, as you must have realized from the first moment you looked into those lovely blue eyes: impeachment insurance.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Blue Eye Lovely
It’s a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. … Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Dream Optimism Thinking
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Fashion Halfhearted Many Other Possible Truth
Experimental science is fascinating, but I don’t want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I’ll read about it.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Experimental People Science Want
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
Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Roles Sharks Taken
Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Atheism Jesus Wine
the fastest-growing brand of religion is of the magical ‘name it and claim it’ variety, in which the deity exists only to meet one’s immediate, self-identified needs.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Exist Magical Name Need Self
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
To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals.”
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Born Country Homeless
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
I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that’s really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it’s very different. You’re out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn’t that fascinating.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Cells Hands Mean
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
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

Democracy Freedom Player
Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Careers Humorous Mother
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
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Behaviour Patterns Replicate Self War
Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we’ve made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we’ve loved it to death.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Earth Expectations Need Pandas Rush
It’s even occurred to me, as a teeny little subversive whisper of a thought, that if we stop mowing the lawn right now, it will probably be a long, long time before the yard gets overrun by lions and snakes.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Long Snakes Yards

The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.

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The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.

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Popular Authors

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