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it used to be almost the first question (just after 'Can you type?') in the standard female job interview: 'Are you now, or have you ever, contemplated marriage, motherhood, or the violent overthrow of the U.S. government?

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
Government
Standards
Ever
Female
Contemplated
Firsts
Marriage
Overthrow
First
Type
Interview
Question
Motherhood
Almost
Interviews
Jobs
Standard
Used
Violent

More quotes by 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.
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.
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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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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.
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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.
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For anyone worn down, The Impossible Will Take a Little While is a bracing double cappuccino.
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Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.
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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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America is addicted to wars of distraction.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born illegals.
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There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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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.
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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No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
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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Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation... none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Roman Catholicism: a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate.
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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For a long time on Earth humans didn't worship good gods that's a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful.
Barbara Ehrenreich