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

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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The secret of the truly successful ... is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.
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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.
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Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
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Yes, I think especially the Pentecostal churches, you know, that there's been such a growth in Pentecostalism. And it's a rejection of the much more dour and barren kind of Calvinist worship and also, the very formal Catholic forms of worship.
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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.
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The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.
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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.
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There seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making urine tests a condition for employment -- anywhere.
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America is addicted to wars of distraction.
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Money does not bring happiness' - only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.
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Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
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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.
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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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Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.
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.
Barbara Ehrenreich