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Ellen Willis Quotes
1941–2006 United States
Ellen Willis (December 14 1941 – November 9 2006) was an American essayist and critic. She was director of the cultural journalism program at New York University and co-founder of the feminist group Redstockings.
United States Critics Feminists Journalists Also known as: Willis, Ellen
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44 quotes
Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that.
Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence.
In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to "What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic."
Today, anxiety is a first principle of social life, and the right knows how to exploit it. Capital foments the insecurity that impels people to submit to its demands.
By definition, the conventional wisdom of the day is widely accepted, continually reiterated and regarded not as ideology but as reality itself. Rebelling against "reality," even when its limitations are clearly perceived, is always difficult.
Surely we have had enough of confusing maleness with "usefulness" and other human virtues.
Dylan is free now to work on his own terms. It would be foolish to predict what he will do next.
In a communications crisis, the true prophets are the translators.
To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.
I believe in the separation of sex and state.
Take back the night? How can women take back the night when they've never had it?
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.
Can the high level of violence in patriarchal cultures be attributed to people's chronic, if largely unconscious, rage over the denial of their freedom and pleasure?
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.
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.
For a decade Americans have been steeped in the rhetoric of "zero tolerance" and the faith that virtually all problems from drug addiction to lousy teaching can be solved by pouring on the punishment.
Marriage, in the sense of a ceremonial commitment of people to merge their lives, is properly a social ritual reflecting religious or personal conviction, and should not have legal status.
Imagination was the key (as John Lennon was to claim, in a song too often misjudged as simpleminded).
Coming Down Again (1989)
I think the craving for freedom for self-determination, in the most literal sense is a basic impulse that can be suppressed but never eliminated.
A genuinely democratic society requires a secular ethos: one that does not equate morality with religion, stigmatize atheists, defer to religious interests and aims over others or make religious belief an informal qualification for public office.
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