Quotes from Barbara Ehrenreich

In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.

You can and should use logic and reason all you want. But it would be a great mistake to ignore the stray bit of data that doesn't fit into your preconceived theories, that may even confound everything you thought you were sure of.

I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.

As Eckhart, one of Otto's many sources, had asserted centuries earlier, referring to the Other as God, the religious seeker must set aside any idea about God as being good, wise, [or] compassionate.

Why shouldn't our "great chain of being" include the other creatures with which we have shared the planet, the creatures we have martyred in service to us or driven out of their homes to make way for our expansion?

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 "patriotism.

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.

If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.

Si hablamos en términos globales, el mayor obstáculo para la felicidad es la pobreza. Las encuestas sobre felicidad, hasta donde podemos confiar en ellas, muestran siempre que los países más felices del mundo suelen ser los más ricos. Estados Unidos está en el puesto 23 y el Reino Unido en el 41, por ejemplo; mientras que la India aparece en el nada halagüeño puesto 125 (de 178 países).

I was an answer-seeking machine, in love with what I called the truth, whether it came in the form of little truth particles stuck to the pages of books or vast patterns screaming out from the obvious and mundane.

Sometimes Carlie hands me the squirt bottle of Bam (an acronym for something that begins, ominously, with butyric - the rest of it has been worn off the label) and lets me do the bathrooms. No service ethic challenges me here to new heights of performance. I just concentrate on removing the pubic hairs from the bathtubs, or at least the dark ones that I can see.

I smoke. It's expensive. It's also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It's a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed.

There is no historically consistent justification for the exclusion of women from healing roles. Witches were attacked for being pragmatic, empirical and immoral. But in the 19th century the rhetoric reversed: Women became too unscientific, delicate and sentimental. The stereotypes change to suit male convenience— we don't, and there is nothing in our innate feminine nature to justify our present subservience.

Life is of course a misnomer, since viruses, lacking the ability to eat or respire, are officially dead, which is in itself intriguing, showing as it does that the habit of predation can be taken up by clusters of molecules that are in no way alive.

The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.

Al final, la felicidad se mide a partir de la satisfacción que una persona declara sentir sobre su propia vida, y quizá sea más sencillo estar satisfecho con ella si uno tiene dinero, se ciñe a las normas sociales, acomoda sus juicios a lo que diga la iglesia y no se preocupa demasiado por las injusticias.

To fight against a war or, better yet, an entire war machine, we had to become warriors ourselves. This is the cunning symmetry of war: Enemies tend to come to resemble one another. And this was perhaps especially so in a culture that appallingly—to us—applied the war meme to just about anything, as in the War on Poverty.

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.

Science works, of course, but from an aesthetic point of view, was it really a great improvement over mythology? Why do we insist that theories work, when they might just as well sit around and look pretty? I couldn't help observing that for every advance in science...some perfectly competent goddess or demiurge is put out of work, a hypothesized spirit dies, or a living thing surrenders its autonomy.

Without people around, furniture has nothing to do but bear witness to the structural inadequacies of the human body: How much padding, cushioning, embracing, enfolding, and supporting we had needed just to stumble about through our days!

A thing cannot be conscious without having agency, but it can have agency without being conscious.

She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.

las grandes empresas cada vez se parecen más a lo que llamamos sectas: organizaciones que exigen total sumisión a un líder de inspiración divina.

Positive psychologists' more important contribution to the defense of the status qyo has been to assert or find that circumstances play only a minor role in determining a person's happiness. ... Indeed, if circumstances play only a small role - even 25 percent - in human happiness, then policy is a marginal exercise. Why advocate for better jobs and schools, safer neighborhoods, universal health insurance, or any other liberal desideratum if these measures will do little to make people happy?