50 Quotes by Ellen Willis

DOGMA: a political belief one is unreasonably committed to, such as the notion that freedom is good and slavery is bad.BIAS: predeliction for a particular dogma. For example, the feminist bias is that women are equal to men and the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior. The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between.(an early comment on backlash, from "Glossary for the Eighties")

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

Someone was waving a large pink-and-white sign that read, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." I was trying, and so were at least thirty thousand other bodies, with varying degrees of post-Aquarian patience, to see the Who for the first time in a year.

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

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 and to anger at political subordination and humiliation.

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 - including the Islamic world, where dissidents are regularly jailed, killed, exiled or merely intimidated and silenced.

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 not so easily be contained by products.

Give people the power to shape their lives to their liking, and their souls will take care of themselves.

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