Ellen Jane Willis (December 14, 1941 – November 9, 2006) was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist, feminist, and pop music critic. Read full biography of Ellen Willis →
The struggle of democratic secularism, religious tolerance, individual freedom and feminism against authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture and... →
My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment... →
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... →
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... →
Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it.
Give people the power to shape their lives to their liking, and their souls will take care of themselves.
As with fascism, the rise of Islamic totalitarianism has partly to do with its populist appeal to the class resentments of an economically oppressed... →
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... →
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.
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.
I can't keep myself from playing roles. The emotionless decadent, looking for diversion from boredom, is a favorite.
Ellen Jane Willis (December 14, 1941 – November 9, 2006) was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist, feminist, and pop music critic.