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… — Ellen Willis Copy Share Image
Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence. — Ellen Willis Copy Share Image
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… — Ellen Willis Copy Share Image
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… — Ellen Willis Copy Share Image
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… — Ellen Willis Copy Share
For the most part, Americans speak of culture and politics as if they were two separate realms. — Ellen Willis Copy Share Image
Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it. By continually pushing the message… — Ellen Willis Copy Share Image
My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to… — Ellen Willis Copy Share Image
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… — Ellen Willis Copy Share
Music that boldly and aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, loved, hated — as good rock ’n’ roll did — challenged me to… — Ellen Willis Copy Share Image
Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is… — Ellen Willis Copy Share Image
Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The… — Ellen Willis Copy Share Image
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… — Ellen Willis Copy Share
