Quote

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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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
Roles
Dropped
Face
Floor
Faces
Buying
Making
Till
Stuff
Starting
Left
Role
Shopped
Make
Gave
Consumerism
People
Unique
Alright

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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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.
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The money that fueled the explosion of gluttony at the top had to come from somewhere or, more specifically, from someone. Since no domestic oil deposits had been discovered, no new seams of uranium or gold, and since the war in Iraq enriched only the military contractors and suppliers, it had to come from other Americans.
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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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Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
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.
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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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Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
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Whether you work outside the home or not, never tell them [your children] that being a mommy is your 'job.' Being a mommy is a relationship, not a profession.
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The secret of the truly successful ... is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.
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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Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
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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war is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public ignominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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
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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.
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For anyone worn down, The Impossible Will Take a Little While is a bracing double cappuccino.
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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It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.
Barbara Ehrenreich