Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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Marriage is socialism among two people.
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Well, the first thing that clued me in to the fact that there was something really scary about breast cancer, way beyond the thought of dying, was coming across an ad in the newspaper for pink breast cancer teddy bears. I am not that afraid of dying, but I am terrified of dying with a pink teddy bear under my arm.
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Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.
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Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.
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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.
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Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
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I've spent so many years talking about poverty and economic justice, I'm strongly tempted to get biblical. Jesus' teachings are so radical; they're just insanely generous and apocalyptic. Christians become more fascinated by the dead Jesus. They don't like the living Jesus.
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My death is incidental, and I worry very much about my loved ones and, you know, would like to make it as easy as possible for them. Or wish I could will away whatever, you know, the sadness they will feel when I die. But for me, nothing. The world goes on.
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So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.
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If there is something I am arguing, it is a critique of science. Science has consistently denied the existence of consciousness other than human. Only in the last 20 years do we have acknowledgement of animal feeling or culture or experience.
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No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
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When I was 13, I had these episodes where I could just see the world without any words attached to it, without any associations. It was a little bit spooky. A lot of people might have even thought it was pathological. I thought it was interesting.
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Someone has to stand up for wimps.
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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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America is addicted to wars of distraction.
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I didn't want to be an author; I wanted to be a scientist. Not that I didn't love literature, but I couldn't distinguish it from reading, and reading was already my default activity, almost like breathing.
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I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.'
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Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.
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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.
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The religions that fascinate me and, you know, could possibly tempt me are not the ones that involve faith or belief. They're the ones that offer you the opportunity to know the spirit or deity.
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We - we spend a lot of time, scholarly time, thinking about love and sex, but very little about the - the kind of joy that can take over a crowd of people or a group of people, in festivity, in ecstatic ritual of some kind, in celebration.
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The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce.
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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.
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It was a very big principle in my upbringing that you should respect everybody's work. The street sweeper. Everybody. You should never look down on anybody for their work.