Ellen Willis Quotes

20 quotes in 366 categories

• My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
• What turns me on is erotica; what turns you on is pornographic.
• 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…
• 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…
• Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it.
• Music that boldly and aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, loved, hated — as good rock ’n’ roll did — challenged me to do…
• 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…
• 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 struggle of democratic secularism, religious tolerance, individual freedom and feminism against authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture and morality is going on all over the world…
• 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…
• For the most part, Americans speak of culture and politics as if they were two separate realms.
• I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.
• The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy and international affairs.
• To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.
• 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…
• Give people the power to shape their lives to their liking, and their souls will take care of themselves.
• 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…
• In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to: What turns me on is erotica; what turns you on…
• 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.

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