15 Quotes by Linda Tirado

We eat junk because it's cheap and it lights up the pleasure centers of our brain. And we do drugs because it's an effective way to feel good or escape something.

[W]hen it's slow, they send you home, and when it's busy, they expect you to stay late. They also expect you to be able to come in to cover someone's shift if a co-worker gets sick at the last minute. Basically, they're expecting you to be available to work all the time. Scheduling is impossible.

We have decided to lock people up for social deviancy these days. We tell ourselves that we’re not running debtors’ prisons, that this isn’t Dickensian.

The question is, how can the rest of the country live knowing that so many of us have to live like this?

I was recently on a college campus and saw at least three kids passed out on benches or at tables. I was tempted to call campus security to report the scourge of people resting. It turns out that whether sleeping on a public bench is a crime or not depends entirely on whether you have enough money to look like you have a place to sleep. Another.

Telling an individual company to do better is a lot like telling an individual poor person to save more – true and helpful, but not so easy in practice.

When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing.

The reason that poor people wind up coping in ways that seem pointlessly self-destructive is that all the constructive stuff costs money. I.

I am not, for all my frustration, opposed to capitalism. Most Americans, poor ones included, aren’t. We like the idea that anyone can succeed. What I am opposed to is the sort of capitalism that sucks the life out of a whole bunch of the citizenry and then demands that they do better with whatever they have left. If we could just agree that poor people are doing the necessary grunt work and that there is dignity in that too, we’d be able to make it less onerous.