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 EHRENREICHAnyone 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better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Yes. I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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 -
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 -
Money does not bring happiness’ – only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.
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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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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 -
… 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 -
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