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The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.

Barbara Ehrenreich

I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don’t understand how she can go so long without food. “Well, I don’t understand how you can go so long without a cigarette,” she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Complaining Long Smoking
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
Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Character Motivation Poverty
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

Benefits Pay Thinking
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Christian Level Low Official Party Support
Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

America Class Thinking
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Patriotic Peace War
If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other peoples, then that must feel pretty good.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Attitude Essence Spiritual
The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Men People Sex
As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Military Occupation Village
There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Courage Difference Positive Thinking
Wars produce warlike societies, which in turn make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone themselves.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Produce War World
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Heart Love People
our great common challenge … is to free people from religion, get it out of our laws, our schools, our health systems, our government and, I would add, also our sporting events. I would really like to see some separation of church and stadium, if we could work on that.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Government Law School
It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Circles Dancing Real
The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Facts Our Poor Society
If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn’t give a damn.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Care Giving Powerful
Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don’t need to have hierarchy so much.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Need People Religious
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
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
while everything else in our lives has gotten simpler, speedier, more microwavable and user-friendly, child-raising seems to have expanded to fill the time no longer available for it.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Children Friendly Live Our
A cynic might conclude that the real purpose of the $500 million-a-year implant business is the implantation of fat in the bellies and rumps of underemployed plastic surgeons.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Purpose Real Years
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
Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Exercise Fitness Health
Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

False Hope Medicine Pain
Roman Catholicism: a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Elderly Hate People
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
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Know Knowing Strength Weakness

The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.

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The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.

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