Quotes from Barbara Ehrenreich

For most people, throughout most of the twentieth century, medical care necessarily involved an encounter with a social superior—a white male from a relatively privileged background.

Por ahora, no puedes sino cambiar tu percepción de la realidad: que de negativa y amarga pase a positiva y afirmadora. Y este fue el gran regalo que le hizo el mundo de la empresa a sus empleados despedidos y a los que se quedaron trabajando el doble: el pensamiento positivo.

The early Christian patriarchs may not have realized that, in attempting to suppress ecstatic practices, they were throwing out much of Jesus too.

The doctor's detachment is not a defense against excessive empathy, but a "downright negative" emotional stance

94 percent of Americans agree that "people who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.

No one ever said that you could work hard—harder even than you ever thought possible—and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.

We don't usually talk about American nationalism, but it is a mark of how deep it runs that we apply the word "nationalism" to Serbs, Russians, and others, while believing ourselves to possess a uniquely superior version called

Finally, I set some reassuring limits to whatever tribulations I might have to endure. First, I would always have a car. In Key West I drove my own; in other cities I used Rent-A-Wrecks, which I paid for with a credit card rather than my earnings. Yes, I could have walked more or limited myself to jobs accessible by public transportation. I just figured that a story about waiting for buses would not be very interesting to read. Second

Lo primero que hay que tener en cuenta es que nuestro sistema inmunológico está diseñado para detectar invasiones externas y pasar por alto a nuestras propias células. Con unas pocas excepciones, el sistema inmunológico no parece reconocer los cánceres que desarrolla el individuo como intrusos, porque de hecho son parte de él mismo."17

The senses are the devil's playground, the arena into which he will try to lure men away from Faith and into the conceits of the intellect or the delusions of carnality.

Do the owners have any idea of the misery that goes into rendering their homes motel-perfect? Would they be bothered if they did know, or would they take a sadistic pride in what they have purchased --boasting to dinner guests, for example, that their floors are cleaned only with the purest of fresh human tears?...I have never employed a cleaning person or service...because this is just not the kind of relationship I want to have with another human being.

La proporción entre el sueldo del presidente y el de uno de sus trabajadores medios pasó, de ser de 24 a 1 en 1965, a ser de 300 a 1 en 2000; como también aumentó la distancia entre el sueldo del presidente y el de su tercer cargo más alto.29

nearly one-fifth of all homeless people (in twenty-nine cities across the nation) are employed in full-or part-time jobs.

En 2004, un estudio puso de manifiesto que el optimismo no aportaba beneficio alguno, en términos de supervivencia, a los que sufrían cáncer de pulmón

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

Their first target was not the peasant healer, but the better off, literate woman healer who competed for the same urban clientele as that of the university-trained doctors.

If a woman dare to cure without having studied she is a witch and must die.

Hasta el ámbito académico, que uno podía considerar un reducto seguro para los gruñones y misántropos, está empezando a sufrir las incursiones del pensamiento positivo.

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.

Everyone, from software writer to accountant, was now subject to the same insecurities as the "lonely salesman" once targeted by Norman Vincent Peale.

In the eyes of the Church, all the witches power was ultimately derived from her sexuality. Here career began with sexual intercourse with the devil. Each witch was confirmed at a general meeting (the witches' Sabbath) at which the devil presided, often iin the form of a goat, and had intercourse with the neophytes. In return for her powers, the witch promised to serve him faithfully. (In the imagination of the Church even evil could only be thought of as ultimately male-directed!)

Just as welfare was said to cause poverty, the experts may soon announce that Medicare causes baldness and that Social Security is a risk factor for osteoporosis: the correlations are undeniable.

As a teenager, I aspired to be a scientist, but too many things happened to distract me from that goal, so I became instead a science appreciator.

la persona que sabe trabajar en equipo es, por definición, alguien "positivo". Alguien que siempre luce una sonrisa, que no se queja, que no les da demasiadas vueltas a las cosas, y que se somete con buen humor a lo que le pida el jefe.