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I'm an obsessive. When I get a problem, a question in my mind, it can take me over.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
I'm interested in what bonds people together. You know, what brings us together in good ways? And there's not a lot known about that.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing - the truly democratic thing about it - is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
If I get incensed about some injustice, you can't make me – I will not just going to sit at my desk, at my computer all the time. I – I might want to march out on that.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
I'm not a nice person.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
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
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I haven't read enough of the Bible. You know, I'm saving the Bible for if I ever get imprisoned, and the only reading material was the Bible.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
We love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
Well, I certainly wouldn't want to live in the 18th century myself, or the 19th either, for that matter.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
A research group found that 56 percent of major companies surveyed in the late '80s agreed that 'employees who are loyal to the company and further its business goals deserve an assurance of continued employment.' A decade later, only 6 percent agreed. It was in the '90s that companies started weeding people out as a form of cost reduction.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
I would never call myself a cancer survivor because I think it devalues those who do not survive. There's this whole mythology that people bravely battle their cancer and then they become survivors. Well, the ones who don't survive may be just as brave, you know, just as courageous, wonderful people.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
I'm not questioning the monotheistic god. I think there's absolutely no evidence for the existence of such a god. When I say that, I mean I'm - part of that is that the idea that God could be all-powerful and also benevolent is on its face contradictory.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
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.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
Yes, I think especially the Pentecostal churches, you know, that there's been such a growth in Pentecostalism. And it's a rejection of the much more dour and barren kind of Calvinist worship and also, the very formal Catholic forms of worship.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
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.
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
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There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
When I was 17, I had an experience that I later learned could be called a 'mystical experience.' It was almost violent. No faces, voices, nothing like that. It is like the world burst and flamed into life all around me. That is not a great image, but it is as good as I will ever do.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
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.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
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 Ehrenreich