Ellen Willis Quotes

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

Ellen Willis

Attitude, Optimistic, Optimism

Ellen Willis (2012). “Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-And-Roll”, p.80, U of Minnesota Press

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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

People, Social Behavior, Human Nature

Letter to "The New York Times", February 27, 1997.

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Music that boldly and aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, loved, hated — as good rock ’n’ roll did — challenged me to do the same, and so, even when the content was antiwoman, antisexual, in a sense antihuman, the form encouraged my struggle for liberation.

Ellen Willis

Struggle, Rocks, Singers

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

Ellen Willis

Silence, Movement, Individual

"Three Elegies for Susan Sontag". "New Politics", Vol. X, No. 3, 2005.

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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

Goal, Abortion, Wade

"Escape from Freedom". "Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination", Vol 1, No 2, 2006.

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

Ellen Willis

Turn Me, Turns

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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

Illustration, Rope, Levels

Ellen Willis (2011). “Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music”, p.221, U of Minnesota Press

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

Ellen Willis

Night

"Ellen Willis, 1941-2006" by Alice Echols, "The Nation", November 10, 2006.

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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

Men, Rejection, Feelings

Ellen Willis (2012). “No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays”, p.33, U of Minnesota Press

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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

Wall, Law, Two

"Freedom from Religion". "The Nation", February 19, 2001.

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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

Home, College, Social Values

"The Pernicious Concept of 'Balance'". "The Chronicle of Higher Education", September 9, 2005.

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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

Crush, Zero, Mistake

"Dreaming of War". "The Nation", October 15, 2001.

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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

Character, Years, Wings

"Escape from Freedom". "Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination", Vol 1, No 2, 2006.

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

Ellen Willis

Art, Advertising, Mass Consumption

Ellen Willis (2011). “Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music”, p.221, U of Minnesota Press

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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

Self, Anxiety, Despair

Review of "Terror and Liberalism" by Paul Berman, "Salon", March 25, 2003.

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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

Real, Class, Organization

"The Democrats and Left Masochism". "New Politics", Vol. 8, No. 3, issue #31, Summer 2001.

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

Ellen Willis

Believe, Struggle, Nihilism

Ellen Willis (2011). “Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music”, p.65, U of Minnesota Press

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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

Meaningful, Ice Cream, People

"Women and the Myth of Consumerism". Book by Ellen Willis, Ramparts, 1969.

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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

Real, Moving, Loss

"How Now, Iron Johns?". "The Nation", December 13, 1999.

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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

Lonely, Opposites, Feelings

"Three Elegies for Susan Sontag". "New Politics", Vol. X, No. 3, Summer 2005.

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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

Government, Ideas, Lines

"Dreaming of War". "The Nation", October 15, 2001.

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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

Believe, Ideas, People

Ellen Willis (2000). “Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial”, Beacon Press (MA)

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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

Spiritual, Couple, Emotional

Ellen Willis (2012). “Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-And-Roll”, p.78, U of Minnesota Press

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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

Art, Demand, Messages

Ellen Willis (2011). “Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music”, p.221, U of Minnesota Press

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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

Religious, Self, Giving

"Freedom from Religion". The Nation, February 19, 2001.

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Born: December 14, 1941
Died: November 9, 2006
Occupation: Essayist
Cite this Page: Citation

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