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 EHRENREICHThe failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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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 -
Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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 -
our great common challenge … is to free people from religion, get it out of our laws, our schools, our health systems, our government and, I would add, also our sporting events. I would really like to see some separation of church and stadium, if we could work on that.
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If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever has to be done has to be done by us.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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 -
If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other peoples, then that must feel pretty good.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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 -
while everything else in our lives has gotten simpler, speedier, more microwavable and user-friendly, child-raising seems to have expanded to fill the time no longer available for it.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals.”
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
it used to be almost the first question (just after ‘Can you type?’) in the standard female job interview: ‘Are you now, or have you ever, contemplated marriage, motherhood, or the violent overthrow of the U.S. government?
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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.
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So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.
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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