Quotes by Ellen Willis

“In its original literal sense, moral relativism is simply moral complexity. That is, anyone who agrees that stealing a loaf of bread to feed one's children is not the moral equivalent of, say, shop...”

“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...”

“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 Amer...”

“The notion that there might be any need for, or possibility of, profound changes in the institutions that shape American life work, family, technology, the primacy of the car and the single-family ...”

“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...”

“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 c...”

“Can the high level of violence in patriarchal cultures be attributed to people's chronic, if largely unconscious, rage over the denial of their freedom and pleasure? To what extent is sanctioned or...”

“In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic.”

“I believe in the separation of sex and state. I also believe that social benefits like health insurance should not be privileges bestowed by marital status but should be available to all as individ...”

“To say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the self-consciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell half the story: one also has to consider that the...”

“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...”

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

“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 stud...”

“It’s not only corruption that distorts the utopian impulse when it begins to take some specific social shape. The prospect of more freedom stirs anxiety. We want it, but we fear it; it goes against...”

“Today, anxiety is a first principle of social life, and the right knows how to exploit it. Capital foments the insecurity that impels people to submit to its demands. And yet there are more America...”

“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 r...”