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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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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
Core
Blue
Situation
Miner
Born
Copper
Father
Miners
Hard
Montana
Collar
Collars

More quotes by 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.
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When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where ... the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.
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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.
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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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The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
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Marriage is socialism among two people.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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
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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.
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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.
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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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From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.
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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
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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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Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
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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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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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.
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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
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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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It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.
Barbara Ehrenreich