Quotes from Barbara Ehrenreich

El pensamiento positivo parece obligatorio en este mundo del cáncer de pecho, hasta el punto de que si alguien es infeliz tiene casi que disculparse

Combine mind plus body with freshly updated data, some of it perhaps collected on your self-monitoring devices, and act quickly to generate fresh instructions to forestall any looming problems. This, I imagine, is how Silicon Valley "immortalists" spend their time—scanning all the health-related information and instantly applying it—which may seem a small price to pay for eternal life.

The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?

Las megaiglesias (y las que aspiran a ese estatus) necesitaban sustituir las bases del cristianismo por otra cosa, y la mayoría de ellas lo ha sustituido por el pensamiento positivo; no porque sea bíblicamente "verdadero" o lo apoyen las Escrituras, sino porque garantiza la satisfacción del "cliente", que es como muchos pastores se refieren a su parroquia.

The religions that fascinate me and, you know, could possibly tempt me are not the ones that involve faith or belief. They're the ones that offer you the opportunity to know the spirit or deity.

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.

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

A research group found that 56 percent of major companies surveyed in the late '80s agreed that 'employees who are loyal to the company and further its business goals deserve an assurance of continued employment.' A decade later, only 6 percent agreed. It was in the '90s that companies started weeding people out as a form of cost reduction.

If I get incensed about some injustice, you can't make me - I will not just going to sit at my desk, at my computer all the time. I - I might want to march out on that.

I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

I became a student of the history of religion. I am fascinated by how religions often center on mystical experience, and in the Old Testament tradition you find flames, the burning bush.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world.

Yes, I think especially the Pentecostal churches, you know, that there's been such a growth in Pentecostalism. And it's a rejection of the much more dour and barren kind of Calvinist worship and also, the very formal Catholic forms of worship.

Yes. I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices.

The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce.

In 2001, I was being treated for breast cancer, and I was pretty sure I was going to recover.

When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.

People tend to judge presidents on how the economy performs, and yet we don't expect them to have the power to do much about it. Or we don't want them to exercise that power, if they were to have it.

Feminists have not tried to "destroy the family". We just thought the family was such a good idea that men might want to get involved in it too.

Experimental science is fascinating, but I don't want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I'll read about it.

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.

Employers have gone away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to a new notion that they are disposable.

A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person.