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To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born illegals.

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
Destitute
Fugitive
Homeless
Native
Born
America
Live
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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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Roman Catholicism: a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate.
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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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I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn't that fascinating.
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Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
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Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though, it's intimate and psychological, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
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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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The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang.
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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.
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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.
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The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress. --Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.
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Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we've made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we've loved it to death.
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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.
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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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while everything else in our lives has gotten simpler, speedier, more microwavable and user-friendly, child-raising seems to have expanded to fill the time no longer available for it.
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There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.
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in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.
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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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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.
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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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