Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreichis an American author and political activist who describes herself as "a myth buster by trade", and has been called "a veteran muckraker" by The New Yorker. During the 1980s and early 1990s she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She is a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist, and author of 21 books. Ehrenreich is perhaps best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: OnGetting By in America. A memoir of Ehrenreich's...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth26 August 1941
CountryUnited States of America
becoming cruelty hitting holes species talking time
There's a lot of cruelty going on all the time, and I'm not just talking about inter-human cruelty. I'm talking about whole species becoming extinct, asteroids hitting planets, black holes gobbling up stars.
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I know that the last thing a book wants is to just sit around unread, serving as an element of interior decorating. So when I have people over, all they have to do is glance at my books, and I implore them to take a few home with them. If I am really ambitious, I pack books into boxes and donate them to prisons.
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It was a very big principle in my upbringing that you should respect everybody's work. The street sweeper. Everybody. You should never look down on anybody for their work.
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We - we spend a lot of time, scholarly time, thinking about love and sex, but very little about the - the kind of joy that can take over a crowd of people or a group of people, in festivity, in ecstatic ritual of some kind, in celebration.
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I'm interested in what bonds people together. You know, what brings us together in good ways? And there's not a lot known about that.
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I've spent so many years talking about poverty and economic justice, I'm strongly tempted to get biblical. Jesus' teachings are so radical; they're just insanely generous and apocalyptic. Christians become more fascinated by the dead Jesus. They don't like the living Jesus.
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Our atheism family tradition is traced to a - I don't know if it was great-great or a great-great-great grandmother who was a poor Irish-American woman in the 1880s in western Montana.
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I would never call myself a cancer survivor because I think it devalues those who do not survive. There's this whole mythology that people bravely battle their cancer and then they become survivors. Well, the ones who don't survive may be just as brave, you know, just as courageous, wonderful people.
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The Civil Rights Movement, it wasn't just a couple of, you know, superstars like Martin Luther King. It was thousands and thousands - millions, I should say - of people taking risks, becoming leaders in their community.
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When someone works for less pay than she can live on -- when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently -- than she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made of a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.
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My death is incidental, and I worry very much about my loved ones and, you know, would like to make it as easy as possible for them. Or wish I could will away whatever, you know, the sadness they will feel when I die. But for me, nothing. The world goes on.
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If there is something I am arguing, it is a critique of science. Science has consistently denied the existence of consciousness other than human. Only in the last 20 years do we have acknowledgement of animal feeling or culture or experience.
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I haven't seen much socially redeeming about religion. I'm an atheist. I don't here want to get into the Hitchens- or Dawkins-style attack on religion. I was raised on that. It's boring.
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I haven't read enough of the Bible. You know, I'm saving the Bible for if I ever get imprisoned, and the only reading material was the Bible.