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 EHRENREICHWell I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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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 -
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 -
Every time a bank swoops down to snatch up a home, it should be met with a crowd of jeering, obstructive neighbors. And although this may be point 4.5, how about organizing a mass refusal to pay back student loans?
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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 -
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 -
Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don’t happen to think it’s an appropriate subject for an ‘ethic.’
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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 -
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 -
Marriage is socialism among two people.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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 -
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 -
To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals.”
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, “Adoption, not Abortion,” although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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