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To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals.”

Barbara Ehrenreich

Ineluctably, the insults inflicted in one war call forth new wars of retaliation, which may be waged within months of the original conflict or generations later.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Generations May War
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Compatiblity Foraging Issue Sex
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Ideas Mean War
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
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
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
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
Anyone who has invented a better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Innovation Public Speaking Stranger
Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers; think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Career Pain Thinking
… there hasn’t been a serious life-style trend since the couch potato was sighted, in about 1986, on one of its rare forays to the video store. Cocooning remains a significant mass enterprise, encouraged by the availability of five hundred new cable channels and microwavable popcorn.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Availability Popcorn Style
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Patriotic Peace War
Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Loss Oneness Self
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
The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Abortion Kids Regret
There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Courage Difference Positive Thinking
I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don’t understand how she can go so long without food. “Well, I don’t understand how you can go so long without a cigarette,” she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Complaining Long Smoking

To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals.”

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To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals.”

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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