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The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Feminists have not tried to “destroy the family”. We just thought the family was such a good idea that men might want to get involved in it too.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Feminist Ideas Men
Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great scientific entrepreneurs free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so moved, build pyramids — without any social relevance or human responsibility at all.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Dream Responsibility Science
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
In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Black Facts Intellectual
At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Generosity Hate Love
Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards, who won’t cry when she’s knocked to the ground while trying to board the six o clock Eastern shuttle, and whose schedule doesn’t allow for a sexual encounter lasting more than twelve minutes.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

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

Clever Evolution Favors
When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where … the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Children College Positive 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
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
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
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
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
Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Book Men Writing
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

Love People Television Watches World
I think it’s tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Biological Joy Say Thinking Years
Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Character Motivation Poverty
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
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
Yes, I think especially the Pentecostal churches, you know, that there’s been such a growth in Pentecostalism. And it’s a rejection of the much more dour and barren kind of Calvinist worship and also, the very formal Catholic forms of worship.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Catholic Rejection Thinking
It is the marketplace that calls most clearly for men to be softer, more narcissistic and receptive, and the new man is the result.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Men Narcissistic Results
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
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
What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the ‘negative people’ from one’s life [as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney]? It might be a good idea to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Mean Practice Teenager
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
Call it ‘nationalism’ when you affix a flag to your car, and leave the word ‘patriotism’ for your efforts to make this country a kinder, more egalitarian place, and one that is less dangerous to the rest of the world.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Car Country Effort
Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though, it’s intimate and psychological, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Change Character Taken

The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.

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The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.

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