It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.
Barbara EhrenreichWhat you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your life.
Barbara EhrenreichConsidering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.
Barbara EhrenreichThe secret of the truly successful ... is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.
Barbara EhrenreichOne of the most essential and mundane of human activities - taking care of children - requires high levels of anxious vigilance. ... [Parents] dare not risk assuming that the sudden quiet from the toddlers' room means they are studying with Baby Einstein. Visualize fratricidal stranglings and electric outlets stabbed with forks: this is how we have reproduced our genomes.
Barbara EhrenreichHowever and wherever war begins, it persists, it spreads, it propagates itself through time and across space with the terrifying tenacity of a beast attached to the neck of living prey. This is not an idly chosen figure of speech. War spreads and perpetuates itself through a dynamic that often seems independent of human will. It has, as we like to say of things we do not fully understand, 'a life of its own.
Barbara Ehrenreich