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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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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
Great
Health
Conveniently
Made
Example
Cheaply
Life
Goes
Abilities
Ability
Hungry
Less
Gift
Someone
Sacrifice
Part
Works
Live
Pay

More quotes by 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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... 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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An asteroid could hit us at any moment. This is not - and also, the most successful kind of life on this planet is not us, it's microbes. They're the ones who greatly outnumber us, and may eventually destroy us.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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.
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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war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions ... It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, Adoption, not Abortion, although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.
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
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Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
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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There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world's total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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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Some people make stuff other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying... We've shopped till we dropped alright, face down on the floor.
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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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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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.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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