Well 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.
BARBARA EHRENREICHJesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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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.
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Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch.
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When someone works for less pay than she can live on – when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently – then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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 -
Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though, it’s intimate and psychological, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
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The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.
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Employers have gone away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to a new notion that they are disposable.
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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 -
The urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.” –Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.
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Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
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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.’
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Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
An asteroid could hit us at any moment. This is not – and also, the most successful kind of life on this planet is not us, it’s microbes. They’re the ones who greatly outnumber us, and may eventually destroy us.
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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 -
From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.
BARBARA EHRENREICH