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Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

American Political figure

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Famous Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

“At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.”

WorldHumansHas BeensHardIndividualGivenTechnologyIssuesDependsProtectSurvivalCommitmentAssumingSpeciesFloatsRelentlessPierceReassuranceOmenEmpiricismKnowledge Of The WorldBison
Book:Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
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“Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores. ... But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.”

WorldYearsWarCultureClassMiddleCarPossibilityIndustryMajorsTwentiesRadioCrowdsFollowingStoresAdvertisingConsumersWar Of The WorldsMiddle ClassHistorianAdsWorld War IiWorld War IConsumerismAmerican CultureConsumer Culture
Book:FEAR OF FALLING
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“the seeker who embraces positive theology finds ... that you can have all that stuff in the mall, as well as the beautiful house and car, if only you believe that you can. But ... if you don't have all that you want, if you feel sick, discouraged, or defeated, you have only yourself to blame. Positive theology ratifies and completes a world without beauty, transcendence, or mercy.”

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Author:Barbara Ehrenreich
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“Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding--and this means, among other things, a public philosophy of gender equality and concern for child welfare. When instead the larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers, the family gets a little more dangerous for everyone, and so, inevitably, does the larger world.”

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Author:Barbara Ehrenreich
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“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?”

WorldShouldSaidRealDoneMightUnderstandingNaturalOneselfWhy NotAnxiousReach OutSolidarityPeersIntrospectionRetreatNatural WorldReal WorkWork To Be DoneUnderstanding Why
Book:Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
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“Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.”

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Book:Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
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“It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world's total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.”

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Book:WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES
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