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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.

Barbara Ehrenreich

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Barbara Ehrenreich
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: August 26
American Political Figure
Essayist
Historian
Immunologist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Peace Activist
Politician
Writer
Butte
Montana
Science
Cell
Hands
Biology
Mean
Cells
Manual
Different
Fascinating
Manuals
Really
Test
Labs
Tests
Tubes
Labor
Experimental
Wasn
Cleaning

More quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

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Surely there must be some way to find a husband or, for that matter, merely an escort, without sacrificing one's privacy, self-respect, and interior decorating scheme. For example, men could be imported from the developing countries, many parts of which are suffering from a man excess, at least in relation to local food supply.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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A child is not a salmon mousse. A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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
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What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life [as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney]? It might be a good idea to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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
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... there hasn't been a serious life-style trend since the couch potato was sighted, in about 1986, on one of its rare forays to the video store. Cocooning remains a significant mass enterprise, encouraged by the availability of five hundred new cable channels and microwavable popcorn.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Consider the standard two-person married couple. ... They will share a VCR, a microwave, etc. This is not a matter of ideology or even personal inclination. It is practically the definition of marriage. Marriage is socialism among two people.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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
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Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Call it 'nationalism' when you affix a flag to your car, and leave the word 'patriotism' for your efforts to make this country a kinder, more egalitarian place, and one that is less dangerous to the rest of the world.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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For a long time on Earth humans didn't worship good gods that's a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we've made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we've loved it to death.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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.
Barbara Ehrenreich