Inspirational Quotes, Motivational Sayings, and Wise Words for Daily Inspiration

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For a decade Americans have been steeped in the rhetoric of "zero tolerance" and the faith that virtually all problems from drug addiction to lousy teaching can be solved by pouring on the punishment. Even without a Commander in Chief who pledges to rid the world of evildoers, smoke them out of their holes and the like, we would be vulnerable to the temptation to brush aside frustrating complexities and relieve intolerable fear (at least for the moment) by settling on one or more scapegoats to crush. To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

Ellen Willis's Popular Quotes

Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and soci…

- Ellen Willis

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

- Ellen Willis

Music that boldly and aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, loved, hated — as good rock ’n’ roll did — challenged me to do the same, and so, …

- Ellen Willis

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

- Ellen Willis

The goal of the right is not to stop abortion but to demonize it, punish it and make it as difficult and traumatic as possible. All this it has accom…

- Ellen Willis

Often men's impulses to coerce and degrade women seem to express not a confident assumption of dominance but a desire to retaliate for feelings of re…

- Ellen Willis

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

- Ellen Willis

Some conservatives have expressed outrage that the views of professors are at odds with the views of students, as if ideas were entitled to be repres…

- Ellen Willis

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.

- Ellen Willis