Having and Being Had
Eula Biss
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Not having money is time consuming. There are hours spent at laundromats, hours at bus stops, hours at free clinics, hours at thrift stores, hours on the phone with the bank or the credit card company or the phone company over some fee, some little charge, some mistake”
“the lies we want to believe tell us something about ourselves.”
“The more comfortable we are, research suggests, the more destruction we are likely to be causing.”
“Piff and his team of researchers found that the rich are more likely than the poor to cut off other vehicles when driving through intersections. And they’re less likely to stop for pedestrians. They’re more likely to cheat in a game, and more likely to think of greed as good. But money is not to blame for this, Piff suggests. What’s to blame is the comfort that a higher class status affords—the independence, the insularity, the security, the illusion of not needing other people. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff told New York magazine, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”
“Never forget that work is the story we tell ourselves about money.”
“Bicycles are sometimes kindly accommodated by cars, often ignored, occasionally respected, sometimes nervously followed, and frequently not even seen. In this sense, riding in traffic is not unlike being a woman among men.”
“When I started riding a bike I realized there’s a real relationship between a body powering itself going down the street and the way you interact with your community,” Smith says. “The violence of the power of a car is an alienating device. It’s the last thing we need in our neighborhoods.”
“Speaking of privilege, David said when he gave me her biography, it is a privilege to spend your life writing. Not a luxury, he clarified, but a privilege.”
“Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies,” Binyamin Appelbaum writes, “is that the average American’s life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health.”
“Part of what makes a job good, they understood, is the sense that what you do matters.”
Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves solely as promotional material for the aforementioned book. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.
Book Keywords:
class-struggle, time, money, capitalism, time-management
