Quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

“If men were equally at risk from this condition -- if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains -- then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies.”

“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament”

“No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”

“The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.”

“We love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist”

“Marriage is socialism among two people.”

“Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.”

“Thats free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing -- the truly democratic thing about it -- is that you dont even have to be a player to lose.”

“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.”

“There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this country three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans-who were not allowed to learn to read and write-and on the Native Americans, who were simply not allowed.”

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.

Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the team. And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.

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.

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

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?

A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the laws.

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.

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

Happiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with ones 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.

As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.