Eve Ensler Quotes
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People need to dance. I'd say dance at least twice a day. That's how to get your energy up and how you keep you revolutionary spirit going. It's Emma Goldman who said, "Any revolution where I can't dance is not my revolution." I think that's the revolution we want.
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I think we are seeing the absolute and utter collapse of male politicians in this U.S country and we're seeing what the underpinnings of the power structure are, which are sexist underpinnings.
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Looking at it, I started crying. Maybe it was knowing that I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous life consuming fantasy , that someone or something was going to do this for me – the fantasy that someone was coming to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms.
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I feel sometimes with boys that the tyranny of patriarchy has had a much more devastating blow on boys than it has on anyone. Because they have literally been forced to disassociate from their hearts.
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My relationship to the desecration of the earth was very theoretical and intellectual until I got sick. I could never watch anything about polar bears dying or the death of bees. There were certain things I knew I couldn't go near because they were too devastating. But I don't think until I got cancer did I get it in my body, what was happening to the earth. I finally went: "Oh! Earth! Organism!"
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We have to bridge and join our struggles and understand how we can't fight violence against women without looking at racism, we can't fight violence against women without looking at economic deprivation or climate change. All these struggles are interconnected.
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I think for me, happiness is crucial, but I think we think that happiness comes from amassing goods and getting things and being loved and being successful, when in fact my experience of happiness comes when you give everything away, when you serve people, when you're watching something you do make somebody happy, that's when happiness happens.
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The fact that women have been moving forward, that a woman was running for president, that we had a black president - I think there was, without a doubt, a whitelash and a complete backlash against the liberation of women, against the power of people of color.
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When I was younger I felt very disempowered, very disappeared. I felt worthless, like I had no right to exist. I think a good part of my life was spent recovering from that. Pulling myself out of that.
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The cancer in me became an awareness of the cancer that is everywhere. The cancer of cruelty, the cancer of carelessness, the cancer of greed.
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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.
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Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn't exist.
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I don't get tired, because every time a woman doesn't die or doesn't get beaten or doesn't get raped or doesn't get honor-killed or doesn't get acid-burned, it's a huge victory.
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Today the United States has the highest prison population in the world, over 2.1 million people. ... We lock people up at a rate that is seven to ten times that of any other democracy.
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I feel very passionate that we need CAT scanners in every country in the world. There's not a CAT scanner in all of eastern Congo. People don't use the word "cancer" because they don't get diagnosed. They just die.
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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.
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Dance is holy, sexual, and it's a way of being very powerful and a little dangerous without being violent.
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Between the combination of Judeo-Christian religious 'be good be good be good' and Capitalist 'something's wrong with you, buy this' and the parental upbringing, which is 'you're wrong, you're not thin enough, you're not smart enough' I mean, hello! We don't have a shot.
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Security isn't what I hunger for. I hunger for change. I hunger for connection.
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What I feel now is connected to people. I feel connected and I feel a lot of love for people. I feel the possibility of what building social movements and what working together in struggle creates. Whatever that energy is, it feels a lot better than what I felt when I was younger - which was worthless and disconnected and isolated and alone.
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I am worried about this word, this notion - security. I see this word, hear this word, feel this word everywhere. Security check. Security watch. Security clearance. Why has all this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure? ... Why are we suddenly a nation and a people who strive for security above all else?
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We have not yet made violence against women abnormal, extraordinary, unacceptable. We have not yet come to see it as a pathological issue.
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With the Gulf spill, I absolutely merged in the time when I had that infection. I couldn't get out of the Gulf spill. There were so many similarities: the drains and the siphoning and the tubes. And also in the way the earth was hurt, the ocean was bleeding. Remember the video cams of the oil gushing? I couldn't stop watching that.
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I'm a nomad. I have a place in New York in the Flatiron District, and I have a place in Paris in Ile Saint-Louis, and I spend a lot of time in Congo.