Ellen Willis Quotes

We entered the 20th century trying to deal with three ideas purporting to define or describe or explain three spheres of action, development and conflict: Darwin on the natural world, Freud on the internal world, Marx on the economic world.

Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility.

We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.

Well, [bad] times like that bring out the best in some people and the worst in others.

Without hesitation, I place Freud among the heroes. He dispossessed the Jewish people of the greatest and most influential of all heroes-Moses.

All [people] are intolerant.... Only they're intolerant of different things.

Even if this advice to portfolio decision makers to drop dead is good advice, it obviously is not counsel that will be eagerly followed. Few people will commit suicide without a push. And fewer still will pay good money to be told to do what is against human nature and self-interest to do.

People like what they like. They're gonna do what they're gonna do.

I've always been antagonistic to any naïve application of the selfish gene theory to politics. Some people have attempted to suggest that it means we are selfish or we should be selfish.

Arbitrage human nature. It's not going to change any time soon.

One nation is to another what one individual is to another; with this melancholy distinction perhaps, that the former with fewer of the benevolent emotions than the latter, are under fewer restraints also from taking undue advantage of the indiscretions of each other.

Human beings are not meant to live alone. There is a fundamental biological imperative that propels you and every organism on this planet to be in a community, to be in relationship with other organisms.

Films don't cause violence, people do. Violence defines our existence. To shield oneself is more dangerous than trying to reflect it.

I actually did trouble to read Marx first hand. I found it illuminating in so many ways; in particular, my perception of the relationship between people and the society in which they live was irreversibly altered.

Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.

What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.

The thing that is most interesting about people is the way they are when no one is looking at them or the way they are when they are in private.

Humans are pack animals. In Biblical times, the great market cities in Europe or the United States, people want to be with other people. And in a way, the more that we're isolated, whether we're living on farms and we're only talking to our cell phone, the greater the need we have for group experience. So while people are saying that no one is going to go shopping because it's just inconvenient, and it's not as easy as buying online, why are people going to concerts? Why are people going to museums? Why are they going to sporting events?

For both Adam Smith and Karl Marx the essential work of caring for people, starting in early childhood, was "just women's work" - and in their minds not even classified as "productive work."

I am puzzled by people today who, after moralizing about the need for cooperation and goodwill and love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself, suddenly invoke the most primitive, barbarous motivations for any kind of progress.

Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.

The widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge but by malice: no one gossips about other people's secret virtues, but only about their secret vices. Accordingly most gossip is untrue, but care is taken not to verify it. Our neighbour's sins, like the consolations of religion, are so agreeable that we do not stop to scrutinise the evidence closely.

If your only nice to the people that are nice to you, big deal; what do you want, a gist certificate? Everyone does that. And if you only say "hi" in the hall to the people that say hi to you, what are doing more than anyone else? Maybe you know people who are different when they're alone than when they're with their friends. they might say "hi" to you if your alone, but with a group they act like they've never seen you.