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To live in poverty is to live with constant uncertainty, to accept galling indignities, and to expect harassment by the police, welfare officials and employers, as well as by others who are poor and desperate.
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
Well
Constant
Employers
Accept
Officials
Poverty
Uncertainty
Accepting
Desperate
Poor
Welfare
Galling
Others
Police
Indignities
Live
Expectations
Indignity
Wells
Expect
Harassment
More quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich
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
Ineluctably, the insults inflicted in one war call forth new wars of retaliation, which may be waged within months of the original conflict or generations later.
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
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
Racist, sexist, and homophobic thoughts cannot, alas, be abolished by fiat but only by the time-honored methods of persuasion, education and exposure to the other guy's-or excuse me, woman's-point of view.
Barbara Ehrenreich
The secret of the truly successful ... is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.
Barbara Ehrenreich
In matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended. You may try to project a thoroughly positive outlook in order to attract a potential boyfriend, but you are also advised to Google him.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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
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
It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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
no job, no matter how lowly, is truly 'unskilled.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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
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
It's even occurred to me, as a teeny little subversive whisper of a thought, that if we stop mowing the lawn right now, it will probably be a long, long time before the yard gets overrun by lions and snakes.
Barbara Ehrenreich
From an entertainment point of view, the Solar System has been a bust. None of the planets turns out to have any real-estate potential, and most of them are probably even useless for filming Dune sequels.
Barbara Ehrenreich
The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs
Barbara Ehrenreich
a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class. ... You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $65 billion family fortune?
Barbara Ehrenreich
Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.
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
