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Ellen Willis

74 quotes

“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 (1941–2006) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Women and the Myth of Consumerism", Ramparts (1969)
“Dylan is free now to work on his own terms. It would be foolish to predict what he will do next. But hopefully he will remain a mediator, using the language of pop to transcend it. If the gap between past and present continues to widen, such mediation may be crucial. In a communications crisis, the true prophets are the translators.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dylan" in Representative Men : Cult Heroes of Our Time (1970) edited by Theodore L. Gross, collected in No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992)
“Despite its numerical insignificance, the anti-abortion left epitomizes the hypocrisy of the right-to-life crusade. Its need to wrap misogyny in the rhetoric of social conscience and even feminism is actually a perverse tribute to the women’s movement; it is no longer acceptable to declare openly that women deserve to suffer for the sin of Eve. I suppose that’s progress — not that it does the victims of the Hyde Amendment much good.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Abortion", Village Voice (1979)
“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 (1941–2006) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to The New York Times (27 February 1997)
“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 (1941–2006) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Need a Radical Left", The Nation (29 June 1998)
“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 (1941–2006) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How Now, Iron Johns?", The Nation (13 December 1999)
“More and more I am coming to the conviction that Roe vs. Wade, in the guise of a great victory, has been in some respects a disaster for feminism. We might be better off today if it had never happened, and we had had to continue a state-by-state political fight. Roe vs. Wade resulted in a lot of women declaring victory and going home. In the meantime we have been losing abortion rights on the ground, both in terms of access and funding and on the ideological and psychological levels.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vote for Ralph Nader!", Salon (6 November 2000)
“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. Of course, secularism in the latter sense is not mandated by the First Amendment. It's a matter of sensibility, not law.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Freedom from Religion", The Nation (19 February 2001)
“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 (1941–2006) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Freedom from Religion" in The Nation (19 February 2001)
“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 (1941–2006) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Freedom from Religion," The Nation (19 February 2001)
“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 (1941–2006) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Democrats and Left Masochism", New Politics, Vol. 8, No. 3, issue #31 (Summer 2001)
“A triumphalist corporate capitalism, free at last of the specter of Communism, has mobilized its economic power to relentlessly marginalize all nonmarket values; to subordinate every aspect of American life to corporate "efficiency" and the bottom line; to demonize not only government but the very idea of public service and public goods.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dreaming of War", The Nation (15 October 2001)
“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. Even without a Commander in Chief who pledges to rid the world of evildoers, smoke them out of their holes and the like, we would be vulnerable to the temptation to brush aside frustrating complexities and relieve intolerable fear (at least for the moment) by settling on one or more scapegoats to crush. To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dreaming of War," The Nation (15 October 2001)
“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 (1941–2006) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman, Salon (25 March 2003)
“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.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography" (1979)
“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 (1941–2006) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Historical Analysis", Dissent (Winter 2005)
“Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is likely, all unwittingly, to do the opposite, for bearing witness is lonely: it breeds feelings of superiority and moralistic anger against those who are not doing the same.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Three Elegies for Susan Sontag", New Politics (Summer 2005), Vol. X, No. 3
“Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Three Elegies for Susan Sontag," New Politics (Summer 2005), Vol. X, No. 3
“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 (1941–2006) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Pernicious Concept of 'Balance'", The Chronicle of Higher Education (9 September 2005)
“It’s not only corruption that distorts the utopian impulse when it begins to take some specific social shape. The prospect of more freedom stirs anxiety. We want it, but we fear it; it goes against our most deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian definitions of morality and order. At bottom, utopia equals death is a statement about the wages of sin.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ghosts, Fantasies, and Hope" Dissent (Fall 2005)
“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 (1941–2006) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Escape from Freedom", Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, Vol 1, No 2 (2006)
“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 (1941–2006) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Escape from Freedom," Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, Vol 1, No 2 (2006)
“Take back the night? How can women take back the night when they've never had it?”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From a conversation with Alice Echols, quoted by Echols in "Ellen Willis, 1941-2006", The Nation (10 November 2006)
“My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect. ("Tom Wolfe's Failed Optimism" 1977)”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it. 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 (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be anticapitalist is not enough. Socialist regimes have attacked the grosser forms of economic inequality, yet in terms of the larger struggle for freedom, socialism in practice has been, if anything, a devastating counterrevolution against the liberal concept of individual rights.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The colonized people who have contributed to the enrichment of the capitalist West share neither its prosperity nor its relative freedom. And the imperatives of the marketplace set people against each other; the comforts of middle-class life are bought at the expense of the poor, liberty at the expense of community.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art that succeeds manages to evade or transcend or turn to its own purposes the strictures imposed on the artist; on the deepest level it is the enemy of authority, as Plato understood. Mass art is no exception.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“as realities get grimmer, the possibilities tend to be forgotten.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. ("Lust Horizons: Is the Woman's Movement Pro-Sex?" 1981)”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. ("Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution")”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“one exasperating example of how easy it is to obliterate history is that Betty Friedan can now get away with the outrageous claim that radical feminist "extremism" turned women off and derailed the movement she built. Radical feminism turned women on, by the thousands. ("Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism" 1984)”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it makes sense to look on violence as a tragic last resort, to ask of any violent act that it be necessary to prevent physical destruction or soul-destroying violation, and that it be directed as narrowly as possible to those most responsible for the conflict. I'm glad the French resistance used terror against the Germans-and I think our bombing of Dresden was a war crime. (“Ministries of Fear” 1985)”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the remedy is not to apologize for Rushdie's book, or qualify the protests. It's to keep emphasizing that the struggle against our own brand of fundamentalism is far from won-ask any American librarian, science teacher, or abortion clinic head-and that the virulence of Khomeini's attack on Rushdie reflects, among other things, conflict between fundamentalists and modernists within the Moslem world. (“In Defense of Offense” 1989)”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There were secularists, democrats, liberals, and feminists in Iran before Khomeini killed or exiled them; there are secularists, democrats, liberals, and feminists in other Islamic countries; and there are immigrants like Salman Rushdie, who have voted with their feet for a freer life. Are they all tools of Western imperialism, poisoned by Satan, as the ayatollah would say? (“In Defense of Offense”)”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of us felt about the sexual revolution what Gandhi reputedly thought of Western civilization-that it would be a good idea. (“Coming Down Again” 1989)”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. ("Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs" 1989)”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“radicals need to recreate a politics that emphasizes our common humanity, to base our social theory and practice on principles that apply to us all.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Optimism of the will and, if possible, the intellect as well-is the engine of emancipation. ("Race and the Ordeal of Liberal Optimism")”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Globalism erodes national and cultural boundaries at both the top and the bottom of the class hierarchy, encouraging the formation of a multiracial, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan elite as well as a multiracial, multicultural, migratory labor force. ("Race and the Ordeal of Liberal Optimism")”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No mass left-wing movement has ever been built on a majoritarian strategy. On the contrary, every such movement-socialism, populism, labor, civil rights, feminism, gay rights, ecology-has begun with a visionary minority whose ideas were at first decried as impractical, ridiculous, crazy, dangerous, and/or immoral.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Recognizing that “reality” is not inevitable makes it more painful; subversive thoughts provoke the urge to subversive action. But such action has consequences-rebels risk losing their jobs, failing in school, incurring the wrath of parents and spouses, suffering social ostracism. Often vociferous conservatism is sheer defensiveness: people are afraid to be suckers, to get their hopes up, to rethink their hard-won adjustments, to be branded bad or crazy.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The perceived conflict between class and cultural politics arises not because they are intrinsically incompatible but because majoritarian leftists have uncritically equated the cultural values of workers and "ordinary people" with their historically dominant voices: white, straight, male, and morally conservative.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the weight of my experience leads me to suspect that in my desire for a freer, saner, and more pleasurable way of life, I am not so different from most people, American or otherwise, as it might presently appear. It is this hopeful suspicion that keeps me writing.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What can "American democracy" mean when no one even bothers to hide the fact that economic policy is made, not by elected officials accountable to their constituencies, but by the croupiers of global capital's floating crap game?”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On a world scale, militant nationalism has followed economic globalism as surely as it once followed colonialism; but while it has served as an outlet for strong and deadly emotions, it has never solved the economic and social problems that provoked it.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only movements with particular social visions and practical goals can give faith a concrete, real-world shape”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a persistent myth that a wife has control over her husband’s money because she gets to spend it. Actually, she does not have much more financial authority than the employee of a corporation who is delegated to buy office furniture or supplies. The husband, especially if he is rich, may allow his wife wide latitude in spending — he may reason that since she has to work in the home she is entitled to furnish it to her taste, or he may simply not want to bother with domestic details — but he retains the ultimate veto power. If he doesn’t like the way his wife handles his money, she will hear about it.”
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Women and the Myth of Consumerism," Ramparts (1969)