Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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.
Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
the fastest-growing brand of religion is of the magical 'name it and claim it' variety, in which the deity exists only to meet one's immediate, self-identified needs.
If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever has to be done has to be done by us.
The secret of the truly successful ... is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.
Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.
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.
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.
Feminists have not tried to "destroy the family". We just thought the family was such a good idea that men might want to get involved in it too.
James Bond in his Sean Connery days ... was the first well-known bachelor on the American scene who was not a drifter or a degenerate and did not eat out of cans.
But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.
When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
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.
You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.
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.
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.
Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much.
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.
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.
Wars produce warlike societies, which in turn make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone themselves.
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.
So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.
The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.
When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where ... the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.
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.
People tend to judge presidents on how the economy performs, and yet we don't expect them to have the power to do much about it. Or we don't want them to exercise that power, if they were to have it.
war is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things.
When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.
Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.
Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Why "revere" the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?
That's what "meaning" is—a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.
The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?
If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.
She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.
A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.
Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around.
The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.
I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.
Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the "laws.
In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.