Ellen Willis

You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to surmise that war has a perverse appeal for the human race, nor is the…

— Ellen Willis

For democrats, it's as crucial to defend secular culture as to preserve secular law. And in fact the two projects are inseparable:…

— Ellen Willis

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

— Ellen Willis

Some conservatives have expressed outrage that the views of professors are at odds with the views of students, as if ideas were…

— Ellen Willis

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

— Ellen Willis

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

— Ellen Willis

My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful…

— Ellen Willis

The public's continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for…

— Ellen Willis

Music that boldly and aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, loved, hated — as good rock ’n’ roll did — challenged…

— Ellen Willis

Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral…

— Ellen Willis

Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social…

— Ellen Willis

The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary,…

— Ellen Willis

I was a 'Big Brother' fan. I thought they were better musicians than their detractors claimed, but more to the point, technical…

— Ellen Willis

The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the "legitimate"…

— Ellen Willis

On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to…

— Ellen Willis

What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over…

— Ellen Willis

To say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the self-consciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell…

— Ellen Willis

The project of organizing a democratic political movement entails the hope that one's ideas and beliefs are not merely idiosyncratic but speak…

— Ellen Willis

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

— Ellen Willis

Often men's impulses to coerce and degrade women seem to express not a confident assumption of dominance but a desire to retaliate…

— Ellen Willis

The goal of the right is not to stop abortion but to demonize it, punish it and make it as difficult and…

— Ellen Willis

A triumphalist corporate capitalism, free at last of the specter of Communism, has mobilized its economic power to relentlessly marginalize all nonmarket…

— Ellen Willis

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

— Ellen Willis

The concept of emotional or spiritual survival has an honorable history, but it does invite self-indulgence. In my own case, the worst…

— Ellen Willis

As with fascism, the rise of Islamic totalitarianism has partly to do with its populist appeal to the class resentments of an…

— Ellen Willis