Ellen Willis Quotes & Sayings

Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not getting the TV? — Ellen Willis

As it is, the profusion of commodities is a genuine and powerful compensation for oppression. — Ellen Willis

DOGMA: a political belief one is unreasonably committed to, such as the notion that freedom is good and slavery is bad.
BIAS: predeliction for a particular dogma. For example, the feminist bias is that women are equal to men and the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior. The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between.
(an early comment on backlash, from "Glossary for the Eighties") — Ellen Willis

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

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

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

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

The public's continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for 30 years been dominated by an aggressive, radical right-wing insurgency that has achieved an influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Its potent secret weapon has been the guilt and anxiety about desire that inform the character of Americans regardless of ideology; appealing to those largely unconscious emotions, the right has disarmed, intimidated, paralyzed its opposition. — Ellen Willis

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

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

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

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

The struggle of democratic secularism, religious tolerance, individual freedom and feminism against authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture and morality is going on all over the world - including the Islamic world, where dissidents are regularly jailed, killed, exiled or merely intimidated and silenced. — Ellen Willis

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

What turns me on is erotica; what turns you on is pornographic. — Ellen Willis

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

Take back the night? How can women take back the night when they've never had it? — Ellen Willis

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

The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drug-war machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture. — Ellen Willis

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

Some conservatives have expressed outrage that the views of professors are at odds with the views of students, as if ideas were entitled to be represented in proportion to their popularity and students were entitled to professors who share their political or social values. One of the more important functions of college that it exposes young people to ideas and arguments they have not encountered at home is redefined as a problem. — Ellen Willis

For the most part, Americans speak of culture and politics as if they were two separate realms. — Ellen Willis

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

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

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

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

The project of organizing a democratic political movement entails the hope that one's ideas and beliefs are not merely idiosyncratic but speak to vital human needs, interests and desires, and therefore will be persuasive to many and ultimately most people. But this is a very different matter from deciding to put forward only those ideas presumed (accurately or not) to be compatible with what most people already believe. — Ellen Willis

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

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

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

I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism. — Ellen Willis

The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the "legitimate" votes of suburban, white, middle-class, affluent males. Even liberal voters and organizations tend on some tacit level to accept the idea that they are not the "real" Americans the Democrats must pursue. — Ellen Willis

My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries. — Ellen Willis

To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake. — Ellen Willis

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

To say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the self-consciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell half the story: one also has to consider that the erotic impulse, ever pressing for satisfaction, had something to do with making the history that encouraged its expression. — Ellen Willis

Give people the power to shape their lives to their liking, and their souls will take care of themselves. — Ellen Willis

The concept of emotional or spiritual survival has an honorable history, but it does invite self-indulgence. In my own case, the worst I ever survived was severe personal and political confusion, the temptation to various sorts of craziness and a couple of bad acid trips. It felt pretty horrendous at the time, and some of it was even dangerous, but Auschwitz it wasn't. — Ellen Willis

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