Ellen Willis Quotes

#1. Someone was waving a large pink-and-white sign that read, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." I was trying, and so were at least thirty thousand other bodies, with varying degrees of post-Aquarian patience, to see the Who for the first time in a year.

Ellen Willis

#2. On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.

Ellen Willis

#3. What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of the blues.

Ellen Willis

#4. To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

Ellen Willis

#5. Take back the night? How can women take back the night when they've never had it?

Ellen Willis

#6. The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy and international affairs.

Ellen Willis

#7. While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order.

Ellen Willis

#8. I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.

Ellen Willis

#9. I can't keep myself from playing roles. The emotionless decadent, looking for diversion from boredom, is a favorite.

Ellen Willis

#10. Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it.

Ellen Willis

#11. Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave.

Ellen Willis

#12. The will to power is the will to ecstasy is the will to surrender is the will to submit and, in extremis, to die. Or to put it another way, the rage to attain a freedom and happiness one's psyche cannot accept creates enormous anxiety and ends in self-punishing despair.

Ellen Willis

#13. For the most part, Americans speak of culture and politics as if they were two separate realms.

Ellen Willis

#14. Surely we have had enough of confusing maleness with "usefulness" and other human virtues. If men had a more modest view of what their masculinity ought to entail, perhaps they could move on from debilitating feelings of loss to tackling their real economic and political problems.

Ellen Willis

#15. I believe that body and spirit are not really separate, though it often seems that way. I believe that redemption is never impossible and always equivocal. But I guess that I just don't know.

Ellen Willis

#16. You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to surmise that war has a perverse appeal for the human race, nor is the attraction limited to religious fanatics committing mass murder and suicide for the greater glory of God.

Ellen Willis

#17. Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence.

Ellen Willis

#18. By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.

Ellen Willis

#19. For democrats, it's as crucial to defend secular culture as to preserve secular law. And in fact the two projects are inseparable: When religion defines morality, the wall between church and state comes to be seen as immoral.

Ellen Willis

#20. Give people the power to shape their lives to their liking, and their souls will take care of themselves.

Ellen Willis

#21. If believers feel that their faith is trivialized and their true selves compromised by a society that will not give religious imperatives special weight, their problem is not that secularists are antidemocratic but that democracy is antiabsolutist.

Ellen Willis

#22. As with fascism, the rise of Islamic totalitarianism has partly to do with its populist appeal to the class resentments of an economically oppressed population and to anger at political subordination and humiliation.

Ellen Willis

#23. Often men's impulses to coerce and degrade women seem to express not a confident assumption of dominance but a desire to retaliate for feelings of rejection, humiliation, and impotence: as many men see it, they need women sexually more than women need them, an intolerable balance of power.

Ellen Willis

#24. As it is, the profusion of commodities is a genuine and powerful compensation for oppression.

Ellen Willis

#25. My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.

Ellen Willis

#26. The goal of the right is not to stop abortion but to demonize it, punish it and make it as difficult and traumatic as possible. All this it has accomplished fairly well, even without overturning Roe v. Wade .

Ellen Willis

#27. What turns me on is erotica; what turns you on is pornographic.

Ellen Willis

#28. I was a 'Big Brother' fan. I thought they were better musicians than their detractors claimed, but more to the point, technical accomplishment was not something I cared about.

Ellen Willis