Quotes from Ellen Willis

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

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.

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)

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

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

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.

To refuse to fight for love that is both free and responsible is in a sense to reject the possibility of love itself.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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