Barbara Ehrenreich - People Quotes

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Consider the standard two-person married couple.... They will share a VCR, a microwave, etc. This is not a matter of ideology or even personal inclination. It is practically the definition of marriage. Marriage is socialism among two people.

Barbara Ehrenreich
When you watch television, you will see people doing many things — chasing fast cars, drinking lite beer, shooting each other at close range, etc. But you will never see people watching television.... we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist.

Barbara Ehrenreich
I was absolutely intrigued by your recent statement on the deficit. Remember how you put it? 'I am from all these people as to what — not only what the situation is but what we can do about it.' Atta boy, George I love a man who can stand up to those 'English-only' freaks and say exactly what's on his mind.

Barbara Ehrenreich
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 shopped till we dropped, all right, face down on the floor.

Barbara Ehrenreich
The fundamental point that democratic socialists have always made remains as true today and as relevant as ever: That human needs must come first, that people are more important than profits, and that some things — health, housing, food, education — which are essential to human survival and dignity must be guaranteed as human rights.

Barbara Ehrenreich
Under the new system (aka capitalism, in this part of the world), huge numbers of people had to be convinced to work extra hard, at pitifully low wages, so that the employing class would not have to work at all. Overnight, with the help of a great number of preachers and other well-rested propagandists, work was upgraded from an indignity to an 'ethic'.

Barbara Ehrenreich
The 'discovery' of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the 'discovery' of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

Barbara Ehrenreich
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
People who just pretend to have a positive attitude may be more acceptable, but they will still attract according to how they are really vibrating- the energy they are emanating will attract their circumstances.

Barbara Ehrenreich
Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don't get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goats cheese... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.

Barbara Ehrenreich
I realize that after decades of positive thinking the notion of realism, of things as they are, may seem a little quaint.... When the stakes are high enough and the risks obvious, we still turn to people who can be counted on to understand those risks and prepare for worst-case scenarios. A chief of state does not want to hear a general in the field say that he 'hopes' to win tomorrow's battle or that he's 'visualizing victory'...

Barbara Ehrenreich