01c. 1981 ADThe universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
02c. 1981 ADThe 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?Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
03c. 1981 ADThe 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?Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
04c. 1981 ADMy religious friends - and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox - were convinced that God had a "plan" for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don't overintellectualize.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
05c. 1981 ADThe conventional term is "mystical experience," meaning something that by its very nature lies beyond the reach of language, except for some vague verbal hand-wavings about "mystery" and "transcendence." As far as I was concerned - as a rationalist, an atheist, a scientist by training - this was the realm of gods and fairies and of no use to the great human project of trying to retain a foothold on the planet for future generations.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
06c. 1981 ADJust now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens, walk on through and at least take a look around.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
07c. 1981 ADAccording to the historian William H. McNeil, European churches did not have pews until sometime in the eighteenth century. People stood or milled around, creating a very different dynamic than we find in today's churches, where people are expected to spend most of their time sitting.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
08c. 1981 ADIn books, coaching sessions, and networking events aimed at the white-collar unemployed, the seeker soon encounters ideologies that are explicitly hostile to any larger, social understanding of his or her situation. The most blatant of these, in my experience, was the EST-like, victim-blaming ideology represented by Patrick Knowles and the books he recommended to his boot-camp participants. Recall that at the boot camp, the timid suggestion that there might be an outer world defined by the market or ruled by CEOs was immediately rebuked; there was only us, the job seekers. It was we who had to change. In a milder form, the constant injunction to maintain a winning attitude carries the same message: look inward, not outward; the world is entirely what you will it to be.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
09c. 1981 ADHuman intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
10c. 1981 ADI expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say science and journalism - a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
11c. 1981 ADThe most flattering spin I can put on this phase of paradoxes and metaphysical tangles is that I was smart enough, at age fourteen, to destroy any fledgling hypothesis I came up with. A tentative explanation, theory, or formulation would pop up in my brain only to be attacked by what amounted to a kind of logical immune system, bent on eliminating all that was weak or defective. Which is to say that my mind had become a scene of furious predation, littered with the half-eaten corpses of vast theories and brilliant syntheses.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
12c. 1981 ADIn fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
13c. 1981 ADThis advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders--orders which are in this case self-generated.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
14c. 1981 ADI understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
15c. 1981 ADAt best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
16c. 1981 ADNo matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
17c. 1981 ADOnce I stand and watch helplessly while some rug rat pulls everything he can reach off the racks, and the thought that abortion is wasted on the unborn must show on my face, because his mother finally tells him to stop.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
18c. 1981 ADI 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.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
19c. 1981 ADA 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.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
20c. 1981 ADCrime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though it's intimate and psychological-resistant to generalization a mystery of the individual soul.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
21c. 1981 ADBreast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
22c. 1981 ADIf you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other people's, then that must feel pretty good.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
23c. 1981 ADMy death is incidental, and I worry very much about my loved ones and, you know, would like to make it as easy as possible for them. Or wish I could will away whatever, you know, the sadness they will feel when I die. But for me, nothing. The world goes on.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
24c. 1981 ADLike many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
