Eve Ensler

Dancing insists we take up space, and though it has no set direction, we go there together. Dance is dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive, and contagious and it breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere, at anytime, with anyone and everyone, and it's free. Dance joins us and pushes us to go further and that is why it's at the center of ONE BILLION RISING.

Before cancer, I was obviously disconnected. I had a tumor the size of a mango inside me and didn't do anything about it. It wasn't like I didn't know something was wrong.

It's a weird thing about the truth: It protects you. What really makes you vulnerable is when you're lying because you're going to get caught. When you tell the truth, there's a strange relief that comes.

Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn’t killed our hearts. It’s killed men’s hearts. It’s silenced them, it’s cut them off.

Why are women immobile? Because so many feel like they’re waiting for someone to say, "You’re good, you’re pretty, I give you permission."

Security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.

I've been involved in social activism my entire life, and I would argue that many people involved in social activist movements have done very little work on themselves.

Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.

I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves.

You have to give to the world the thing that you want the most, in order to fix the broken parts inside you.

I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense.

When you bring consciousness to anything, things begin to shift.

It seems to me there's this tyranny that's not accidental or incidental, to make women feel compelled to look like somebody they're not. I think the effort is being made to get us to turn our time and attention to this instead of important political issues.

Danger lurks when people are dissociated and detached from their own story or feelings.

Be transparent as wind, be as possible and relentless and dangerous, be what moves things forward without needing to leave a mark, be part of this collection of molecules that begins somewhere unknown and can't help but keep rising. Rising.Rising. Rising.

Stop trying to fix your body. It was never broken.

For many years now, I feel like my own body struggle has been linked and connected with women I meet in the world. I think we're in this together.

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.

I think violence against women in America has become ordinary - it's been made absolutely acceptable.

I would rate the fact that I get to be alive a big beautiful 10. Satisfaction with myself - work in progress.

I really want to help stop violence toward women.