Quotes from Barbara Ehrenreich

But suburbanization, probably more than any other single factor, hid the poor from view.

The answer, I think, is that positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is part of our ideology—the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it.

The real issue was control: male upper-class healing under the auspices of the Church was acceptable, female healing as part of a peasant subculture was not.

the witch was an empiricist: she relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy, and childbirth—whether through medications or charms.

With his long hair, his hints of violence, and his promise of ecstasy, Dionysus was the first rock star.

the very notion of personality, which is what we are trying to get at here, seems to have very limited application to me and quite possibly to everyone else. Self is another dodgy concept, since I am, when I subject this 'I' to careful inspection, not much more than a flickering of affinities, habits, memories, and predilections that could go either way- towards neediness or independence for example courage or cowardice.

Sometimes writing is pure hell. I'll write something and look at it in a few hours and say, This is crap. What will I do with my life? I'll never write again. It's a bipolar business, and you bounce back. You become gripped with some new insight that shows the way.

Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that—as a woman—she dared to cure at all.

The] strong belief in opportunity and upward mobility is the explanation that is often given for Americans' high tolerance for inequality. The majority of Americans surveyed believe that they will be above mean income in the future (even though that is a mathematical impossibility)."5

In Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy (Verso, 1997), Kim Moody cites studies finding an increase in stress-related workplace injuries and illness between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s. He argues that rising stress levels reflect a new system of "management by stress" in which workers in a variety of industries are being squeezed to extract maximum productivity, to the detriment of their health.

Hard-headed corporate culture is becoming interested in how to get more work out of fewer workers. They're realizing that if their workers are happy, they will work harder and more productively. So they're leading the charge."49

Durante siglos, al menos desde la reforma protestante, las elites económicas occidentales se han regocijado en la idea de que ser pobre es una situación voluntaria. Los calvinistas la consideraban una consecuencia de la dejadez y las malas costumbres; y los pensadores positivos la atribuyen a una incapacidad obstinada para abrazar la abundancia.

Political power, too, is concentrated within the top 20 percent, since its members are far more likely than the poor—or even the middle class—to discern the all-too-tiny distinctions between candidates that can make it seem worthwhile to contribute, participate, and vote.

If we want developed societies with women doctors, political leaders, teachers, bus drivers, and computer programmers, we will need qualified people to give loving care to their children. And there is no reason why every society should not enjoy such loving paid child care.

Some odd optical property of our highly polarized and unequal society makes the poor almost invisible to their economic superiors.

el colapso económico debería haber convertido en historia esa idea de que la pobreza es un fracaso del individuo, o el fruto de una disfunción interna. En las colas del paro y las de la beneficencia hay tantas hormigas como cigarras, tantos optimistas habituales como depresivos crónicos.

job searching, properly undertaken, should be far more time-consuming than an actual job: "If you have a job, then you might have the luxury of working 9:00 to 5:00. If you're getting a job, then plan on twelve to sixteen hours a day."1

The organization of lab work was, and still is, entirely feudal. A "lab" was not only a place or a room or series of rooms, it was the fiefdom of a particular scientist. To "go into" a lab as a grad student was to apprentice yourself to this scientist, with the idea that you would, after several years of patient toil, ascend to a similar rank yourself, at which point you would be able to offload the manual labor to people more junior than yourself.

So this was the mental procedure, which even a little girl could learn: First, size up the situation. Make sure you have all the facts, and nothing but the facts—no folklore, no conventional wisdom, no lazy assumptions. Then examine the facts for patterns and connections. Make a prediction. See if it works. And if it doesn't work, start all over again.

I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations. And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful If not, it can't be helped.

When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly—the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party.

T]he immune system is a metaphor for the self. Its ostensible job is the defense of the organism, but it is potentially a treacherous defender, like the Praetorian guard that turns its swords against the emperor. Just as the immune system can unleash the inflammations that ultimately kill us, the self can pick at a psychic scar - often some sense of defeat or abandonment - until a detectable illness appears, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, or crippling anxiety.

tengo demasiada información y me falta ingenuidad

algunos de los regímenes más despiadados y autoritarios del mundo han exigido de sus súbditos un optimismo irredento y un constante buen humor.