"Employers have gone away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to a new notion that they are disposable."

"Well, the first thing that clued me in to the fact that there was something really scary about breast cancer, way beyond the thought of dying, was coming across an ad in the newspaper for pink breast cancer teddy bears. I am not that afraid of dying, but I am terrified of dying with a pink teddy bear under my arm."

"America is addicted to wars of distraction."

"We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather."

"We love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist."

"Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous."

"Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America."

"The internet was supposed to make this whole business of job searching rational and simple. You could post your resume and companies would search them and they'd find you. It doesn't seem to work that way. There aren't enough jobs for experienced, college educated managers and professionals."

"If there is something I am arguing, it is a critique of science. Science has consistently denied the existence of consciousness other than human. Only in the last 20 years do we have acknowledgement of animal feeling or culture or experience."

"Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest."

"My 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."

"I've spent so many years talking about poverty and economic justice, I'm strongly tempted to get biblical. Jesus' teachings are so radical; they're just insanely generous and apocalyptic. Christians become more fascinated by the dead Jesus. They don't like the living Jesus."

"Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia."

"For a long time on Earth humans didn't worship good gods; that's a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful."

"There's a lot of cruelty going on all the time, and I'm not just talking about inter-human cruelty. I'm talking about whole species becoming extinct, asteroids hitting planets, black holes gobbling up stars."

"That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing - the truly democratic thing about it - is that you don't even have to be a player to lose."

"Like 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."

"We - we spend a lot of time, scholarly time, thinking about love and sex, but very little about the - the kind of joy that can take over a crowd of people or a group of people, in festivity, in ecstatic ritual of some kind, in celebration."

"A research group found that 56 percent of major companies surveyed in the late '80s agreed that 'employees "who "are loyal to the company and further its business goals deserve an assurance of continued employment.' A decade later, only 6 percent agreed. It was in the '90s that companies started weeding people out as a form of cost reduction."

"Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world."

"When I was 13, I had these episodes where I could just see the world without any words attached to it, without any associations. It was a little bit spooky. A lot of people might have even thought it was pathological. I thought it was interesting."

"Well, I certainly wouldn't want to live in the 18th century myself, or the 19th either, for that matter."

"I haven't read enough of the Bible. You know, I'm saving the Bible for if I ever get imprisoned, and the only reading material was the Bible."

"That's the really neat thing about Dan Quayle, as you must have realized from the first moment you looked into those lovely blue eyes: impeachment insurance."

"The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well."

"Yes. I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices."

"It was a very big principle in my upbringing that you should respect everybody's work. The street sweeper. Everybody. You should never look down on anybody for their work."

"The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce."

"I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this."

"When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation."

"A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America"

"My parents were atheists, strong atheists. I never got the answer 'God.'"

"Someone has to stand up for wimps."

"Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much."

"The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease."

"Yes, I think especially the Pentecostal churches, you know, that there's been such a growth in Pentecostalism. And it's a rejection of the much more dour and barren kind of Calvinist worship and also, the very formal Catholic forms of worship."

"Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an 'ethic.'"

"I'm not questioning the monotheistic god. I think there's absolutely no evidence for the existence of such a god. When I say that, I mean I'm - part of that is that the idea that God could be all-powerful and also benevolent is on its face contradictory."

"I didn't want to be an author; I wanted to be a scientist. Not that I didn't love literature, but I couldn't distinguish it from reading, and reading was already my default activity, almost like breathing."

"There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage."

"The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society."

"Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour."

"What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're actually selling is your life."

"I'm not a nice person."

"Marriage is socialism among two people."

"Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money."

"When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist."

"The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress." --Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260."

"As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems."

"There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky."