Quote

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.

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
Perfect
Urges
Easy
Stranger
Outdoors
Appearance
Barbara
Dancing
Suppress
Embrace
Mock
Dance
Strangers
Streets
Urge
Powerful
Transform

More quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

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There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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It's a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. ... Dreams go out and fulfill themselves wishes need only to be articulated.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great scientific entrepreneurs free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so moved, build pyramids -- without any social relevance or human responsibility at all.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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
Barbara Ehrenreich
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There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.
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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Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.
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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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.
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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Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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The war with Iraq ... had to be one of the greatest non sequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that.
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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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
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in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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
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But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of 'traditional values' installed. ... the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.
Barbara Ehrenreich