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Barbara Ehrenreich QUOTES

Barbara Ehrenreich QUOTES

1 " But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

2 " I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich

3 " Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich

4 " The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done? "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

5 " In matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended. You may try to project a thoroughly positive outlook in order to attract a potential boyfriend, but you are also advised to Google him. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich

6 " The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

7 " Happiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with one's life - a state of mind perhaps more accessible to those who are affluent, who conform to social norms, who suppress judgment in the service of faith, and who are not overly bothered by societal injustice...The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists' tests of happiness and well-being, for example, rest heavily on measures of personal contentment with things as they are. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

8 " What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move 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. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

9 " In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

10 " A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

11 " If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

12 " But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

13 " Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich

14 " She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich

15 " Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

16 " The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

17 " The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist? "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

18 " The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another? "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

19 " Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens, walk on through and at least take a look around. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

20 " According to the historian William H. McNeil, European churches did not have pews until sometime in the eighteenth century. People stood or milled around, creating a very different dynamic than we find in today's churches, where people are expected to spend most of their time sitting. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich