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.
BARBARA EHRENREICHin 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.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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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?
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we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.
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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.
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There’s more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.
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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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Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women’s liberation… none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
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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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The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public ignominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.
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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.
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Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production – only to produce a race of bed-wetters!
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Roman Catholicism: a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate.
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Anyone 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.
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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.
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A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America
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My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan’s life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.
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Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
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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.
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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.
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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 -
What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re really selling is your life.
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Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.
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The Republicans hardly need a party and the cumbersome cadre of low-level officials that form one; they have a bankroll as large as the Pentagon’s budget, dozens of fatted PACs, and the well-advertised support of the Christian deity.
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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.
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The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.
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For anyone worn down, The Impossible Will Take a Little While is a bracing double cappuccino.
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Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don’t need to have hierarchy so much.
BARBARA EHRENREICH