Ellen Willis Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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