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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

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
Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Endless War Warrior
In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shite fundamentalists.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Matter Spiritual War
Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Atheism Jesus Wine
To live in poverty is to live with constant uncertainty, to accept galling indignities, and to expect harassment by the police, welfare officials and employers, as well as by others who are poor and desperate.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Expectations Police Poverty
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
The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Facts Our Poor Society
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
In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory — horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene — and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Horse Shoes Space
We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Freedom Speech Weather
Marriage is socialism among two people.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Eugenics Marriage Two
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
When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Blue Father Montana
For the millions of us who live glued to computer keyboards at work and TV monitors at home, food may be more than entertainment. It may be the only sensual experience left.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Food Home Sensual
Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Clever Evolution Favors
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

People Roles Unique

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes