Quotes from Barbara Ehrenreich

Inadvertently, I had stumbled across what has been called the Harvard law of animal behavior, which is related to Murphy's law: You can have the most beautifully designed experiment with the most carefully controlled variables, and the animal will do what it damn well pleases.

En la Unión Soviética, igual que en los países del Este y en Corea del Norte, los censores exigían que el arte, la literatura y el cine estuvieran llenos de alegría, que los héroes fueran felices, que la trama hablara de lograr las cuotas de producción y que el final feliz pasara por un glorioso futuro revolucionario.

NK, or natural killer, cells, which, like macrophages, attack targets like microbes, do not always kill. A 2013 article reports that about half of the NK cells sit out the fight, leaving a minority of them to become what their human observers call serial killers.

Lo que de verdad tiene el pensamiento positivo de ideología conservadora es su apego al sistema, con todas sus desigualdades y sus abusos de poder.

Way before puberty, before the journal, before the formulation of my life's mission, when I must have been eight or younger, I had a rule: "Think in complete sentences." No giving way to inner screams or sobs—just keep stringing out words in grammatical order. This was a way to keep from going under

very little is known about the fate of former welfare recipients because the 1996 welfare reform legislation blithely failed to include any provision for monitoring their postwelfare economic condition

67 percent of the adults requesting emergency food aid are people with jobs.22

Tonight, unhappy with your love, your job, your life, not enough money? Use your head. You can think yourself into a lot better you. Positive thoughts can transform, can attract the good things you know you want. Sound far-fetched? Think again. It's supported by science.

During your career with Wal-Mart, you may be cross-trained in other departments in your facility. This will challenge you in new areas, and help you be a well-rounded Associate" ("Wal-Mart Associate Handbook," p. 18).

The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?

La mayoría elegiríamos a un médico que esté dispuesto a investigar si el diagnóstico podría ser el peor posible, en vez de uno que llegue enseguida a la conclusión de que todo está fenomenal.

Most accounts of mystical experiences... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be living or alive, as in living God. But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose?

pero nadie se atreve a dar por supuesto que, si los niños llevan un rato callados, es porque están viendo un deuvedé educativo. No, las madres enseguida piensan que un hermano ha estrangulado a otro, o que han metido un tenedor en el enchufe; así es como se perpetúa nuestro genoma.

It's not only "my work"—forgive the pompous phrase—that I bequeath to my survivors but all the mental and sensual pleasures that come with being a living human: sitting in the spring sunshine, feeling the warmth of friends, solving a difficult equation. All that will go on without me. I am content, in the time that remains, to be a transient cell in the larger human super-being.

To make a mess that another person will have to deal with - the dropped socks, the toothpaste sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the dirty dishes left from a late-night snack - is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms.

Why revere the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?

mundo del pensamiento positivo, los demás no están ahí para que los cuidemos, ni para darnos baños de realidad que no les hemos pedido. Solo tienen sentido si nos animan, nos aplauden y nos reafirman. Y aunque esto suena de lo más despiadado, hay mucha gente normal que adopta esta filosofía a modo de credo

Mires a donde mires, te encuentras con la jerga empresarial: "incentivos", "valor añadido", "pasos adelante"; las mismas cadenas de mando, las mismas oficinas con iguales mesas y cubículos, la misma funcionalidad neutral, sin concesión alguna a la estética; la misma fe en la motivación y en el espíritu de equipo prefabricado.

N]o matter how much effort we expend, not everything is potentially within our control, not even our own bodies and minds. [...] The body - or, to use more cutting-edge language, the mindbody - is not a smooth-running machine in which each part obediently performs its tasks for the benefits of the common good. It is at best a confederation of parts - cells, tissues, even thought patterns - that may seek to advance their own agendas, whether or not they are destructive of the whole.

We may imagine that the mind houses a singular self, an essence of I-ness, distinct from all other selves and consistent over time. But attend closely to your thoughts and you find they are thoroughly colonized by the thoughts of others, through language, culture, and mutual expectations. The answer to the question of what I am, or you are, requires some historical and geographical setting.

Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the team. And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.

One can't even find the concept of the "immortal soul" in the Bible. It was grafted onto Christian teachings from the pagan Greeks long after the Bible was written.2

It's humbling, this business of applying for low-wage jobs, consisting as it does of offering yourself--your energy, your smile, your real or faked lifetime of experience--to a series of people for whom this is just not a very interesting package.

Parents could see what was happening to their own children, who were being drawn to electronic devices—cell phones, computers, and iPads—as if to opium-infused cupcakes.