Ellen Willis
Ellen Willis
Ellen Jane Williswas an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist, feminist, and pop music critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth14 December 1941
CountryUnited States of America
religious self giving
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 problem is not that secularists are antidemocratic but that democracy is antiabsolutist.
self anxiety despair
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 cannot accept creates enormous anxiety and ends in self-punishing despair.
self expression erotic
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 erotic impulse, ever pressing for satisfaction, had something to do with making the history that encouraged its expression.
art commercial cultural far form grasp itself seem taken
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 itself comes from the commercial exploitation of the blues.
casts imagine trauma
To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.
artificial discourse foreign nowhere politics separation
The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy and international affairs.
diversion playing
I can't keep myself from playing roles. The emotionless decadent, looking for diversion from boredom, is a favorite.
cared technical
I was a 'Big Brother' fan. I thought they were better musicians than their detractors claimed, but more to the point, technical accomplishment was not something I cared about.
believe guess seems spirit though
I believe that body and spirit are not really separate, though it often seems that way. I believe that redemption is never impossible and always equivocal. But I guess that I just don't know.
politics separate
For the most part, Americans speak of culture and politics as if they were two separate realms.
artists awful corrupt courage dominated education face imperative modernist optimism religious romantics scorn secular supreme taught thinkers truth
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 soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries.
appeal attraction committing freud glory god greater human limited mass nor perverse religious war
You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to surmise that war has a perverse appeal for the human race, nor is the attraction limited to religious fanatics committing mass murder and suicide for the greater glory of God.
lives people power shape souls
Give people the power to shape their lives to their liking, and their souls will take care of themselves.
contained easily encouraged expansive pushing
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.