110+ Eve Ensler Quotes On Education, Joy And Feminist

Eve Ensler is an American playwright, activist, and performer. She is best known for her play The Vagina Monologues, which has been performed in over 140 countries. Ensler’s work focuses on the celebration of the female body and the empowerment of women. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Eve Ensler on education, love, life.

Top 10 Eve Ensler Quotes

1. I have been a depressed person most of m life. I was always in the throes of self-hatred.
2. When we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us.
3. We have not yet made violence against women abnormal, extraordinary, unacceptable. We have not yet come to see it as a pathological issue.
4. In the United States, the last recorded clitoridectomy for curing masturbation was performed in 1948--on a five year old girl.
5. Geography does not define you - love does.
6. 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.
7. Why don't we teach sex the way we teach math or history? It is such a deeply crucial and healing part of life and we offer no road map. I think it is core to ending violence.
8. Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn't exist.
9. I honestly never understood how violence against women became a women's issue. 95 percent of the violence men are doing to women.
10. I am so grateful to be alive. It's ridiculous to be alive.

Eve Ensler Short Quotes

• Unless men are active allies, we'll never end violence against women and girls.
• Money doesn't make you special, it makes you lucky. Be generous, be crazy, be outrageous.
• Since cancer, I feel like I have dreams rather than ambitions, visions rather than plans.
• I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.
• Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma.
• Decide whether you want to be liked or admired.
• My commitment originated in my own story and my own relationship to violence.
• Stop trying to fix your body. It was never broken.
• The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure.
• Danger lurks when people are dissociated and detached from their own story or feelings.

Eve Ensler Quotes About Love

[Carrie Rethlefsen] wore an 'I heart my vagina' button to her high school in Minnesota. She was basically threatened to be expelled from school. They told her she couldn't love her vagina in high school. — Eve Ensler

If you were around in the '60s, you already know that music and art and love are a critical part of the revolution. This is how we fight. — Eve Ensler

We're in a crisis. We're in a crisis like I don't think America has ever known in my lifetime. But we have to keep joy in our lives, love in our lives, poetry in our lives, dancing in our lives. — Eve Ensler

People are more afraid to love than they are to kill. — Eve Ensler

I came out of the nine-hour surgery and I had tubes in every direction, and those nurses at the Mayo Clinic, I could cry for four days at the kindness of those nurses. The care, the detail of the care, the attention that just never wavered, never complained. The love. — Eve Ensler

The love is all around us. I made a life of love. — Eve Ensler

I believe in fierce love, pushing the edge, calling the robbers, the corporates, the elites, the pillagers and insanely wealthy to task, going whatever distance we need to go now to protect our earth and each other. — Eve Ensler

One of the most radical things women can do is to love their body. — Eve Ensler

Do you say that tree isn't pretty cause it doesn't look like that tree? We're all trees. You're a tree. I'm a tree. You've got to love your body, Eve. You've got to love your tree. Love your tree. (Leah) — Eve Ensler

There is a global epidemic where one out of three women will be beaten or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes? How are we going to build a future of love and connection? And why would this not be of utmost concern to men? — Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler Quotes About Life

I think so much of my early life, even though I grew up White and middle class, I was completely shattered by the horrifically violent atmosphere I grew up in. I am a consequence of violence. That opened a door to many realities that I would not have experienced had I not survived what I did. — Eve Ensler

I think what's been true across the board is the universal patriarchy, the fear of women ever being born back into complete sexuality and life-force. This manifests itself in different cultural variances, but that's really what's going on everywhere. — Eve Ensler

I have been struggling to find my way back into my body my whole life. — Eve Ensler

I think many of us get separated from the mothership - our body - early on. I think the mothership is also the Earth, and life itself. Trauma separates us from that and dissociates us from our hearts. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

If you listen to the real in you, that part that's pulsing and has questions and is trying to figure something out, it will shape your life in a way where, when you get to be sixty, you'll succeed. You'll be happy about your life. — Eve Ensler

You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was so encompassing. — Eve Ensler

Women are the primary resource of the planet. They give birth, we come from them. They are mothers, they are visionaries, they are the future. If we can figure out how to make women feel safe and honor women, it would be parallel or equal to honoring life itself. — Eve Ensler

When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler Quotes About Empowering

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. — Eve Ensler

The only point of having power it seems to me is to empower others. The only point of leadership is to inspire. — Eve Ensler

stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world! — Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler Quotes About Security

Security isn't what I hunger for. I hunger for change. I hunger for connection. — Eve Ensler

It is almost a guarantee that in the pursuit of security you will become more insecure. Inherent in the quest for security is its undoing. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler Quotes About Body

Political change and academic change and intellectual change are obviously crucial, but they don't necessarily change society. They can change a particular class and give everybody in that class great arguments, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the body of the culture. — Eve Ensler

What happened with cancer was that I just became a body. There was nothing else but body for a month. I was chemo'd and operated on and cut and poked. At first it was really horrifying and scary, and then it was just,Wow. You're in your body. This is body! — Eve Ensler

What happens when someone throws you against a wall or tells you you're a jackass or puts you down or calls you bad names? It goes into your body. We hold it in our body. If we don't have a way to let that go and release that, it becomes sickness eventually. — Eve Ensler

If the theatre has taught me anything, it's that when things change in the body, in the body politic, in the body of the world, in the body of the earth, in the body of the person, there's change. You never go back. — Eve Ensler

I think that it was really rock-and-roll stars, women who were breaking boundaries with their bodies and their voices and their beings and their music. I spent a lot of time at concerts,just watching women rock out. They expressed so much of what I believed could be possible. — Eve Ensler

I think we have made progress. There's no doubt about it, we have moved forward. But there's some essential, core thing that has not been deconstructed. And I'm telling you, it's connected to the body. I know it is. — Eve Ensler

There were momentary visitations. I was a visitor, not an inhabitant. I think I say that at the beginning of the book: "I have made visits to the earth in my body, but it's always been as a visitor." — Eve Ensler

Anorexia was my attempt to have control over my body and manipulate my body and starve my body and shape my body. It was not a very good relationship. It was the sort of relationship my father had to my body. It was a tyrannical, "you'll do what I tell you" relationship. — Eve Ensler

Everything you deny is actually killing you on some level. You see something, you feel something wrong with your body, you pretend it's not happening, it goes on, it grows, it gets worse. — Eve Ensler

I think all my work's been about how do women get back into our bodies; how do men get back. We're all disassociated. — Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler Famous Quotes And Sayings

Good is towing the line, being behaved, being quiet, being passive, fitting in, being liked, and great is being messy, having a belly, speaking your mind, standing up for what you believe in, fighting for another paradigm, not letting people talk you out of what you know to be true. — Eve Ensler

An activist is someone who cannot help but fight for something. That person is not usually motivated by a need for power or money or fame, but in fact is driven slightly mad by some injustice, some cruelty, some unfairness, so much so that he or she is compelled by some internal moral engine to act to make it better. — Eve Ensler

When I was younger I was much more polemical and didactic, much less trusting. Inherently my own vision of the world would weave its way through the characters. Also, my concerns are changing. What happens is you write a few plays and get boxed into some idea of what your concerns are and what you're supposed to be writing about. — Eve Ensler

We can't walk where we want to walk or be who we want to be or dress the way we want to dress or go anywhere any time of day. I am talking about the freedom that comes with just knowing that you're okay, and that you have value and you have identity, and you don't have to keep proving yourself. — Eve Ensler

The verb that's been enforced on girls is to please. Girls are trained to please...I want us all to change the verb. I want the verb to be educate, or activate, or engage, or confront, or defy, or create. — Eve Ensler

What neo-capitalism does so brilliantly is that it's always subdividing and dividing, so that people are never able to be joined in their numbers and strength in a unified way. That is exactly what we have to overcome. — Eve Ensler

Naming things, breaking through taboos and denial is the most dangerous, terrifying, and crucial work. This has to happen in spite of political climates or coercions, in spite of careers being won or lost, in spite of the fear of being criticized, outcast, or disliked. I believe freedom begins with naming things. Humanity is preserved by it. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

I think there are so many children being brought up in some form of violence, be it violence of poverty or sexism or racism or homophobia or transphobia. That violence takes a life to transform or overcome. I don't think people should be spending their lives dealing with that. I think people should be thriving, playing, creating, evolving. — Eve Ensler

People didn't feel so much shame around it and that they didn't feel so much humiliation around it. And the other thing that people have given me a lot of feedback about - something I'm very excited about - is all the stuff around chemo as an "empathetic warrior." — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

Writing and giving voice to what I am feeling makes me happy. And supporting people in finding their voice, passion, outrage and resistance. There is nothing better than that. — Eve Ensler

I want to read so I can read the Koran read the signs in the street know the number of the bus I'm supposed to take when I one day leave this house. — Eve Ensler

It seems to me that we spend an inordinate amount of time and attention on fixing ourselves when we could really be directing that out to serving others. — Eve Ensler

People are sad. People are broke. People are worried about money, people are worried that they're not enough and not amounting to anything and they don't feel good about themselves. People have rough times, and everybody's pretending it's not true, and we need to break that veneer. — Eve Ensler

Women not only get violated, but then we take on the struggle to end it too... As a man, how could the destruction of women be anything to you but devastating? Think about the fact that the women being hurt are your mothers, daughters, sisters. — Eve Ensler

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." — Eve Ensler

I literally would go to see Tina Turner any opportunity I had because being in the presence of Tina Turner was like being in the presence of transformative energy, and feminist transformative energy. I remember thinking to myself, whatever this is, it's revolution. Whatever this is, it's change embodied in a woman. — Eve Ensler

The devastation of neoliberalism is so multi-fold, whether it's violence against women or desperate economic inequality or the destruction of the planet. — Eve Ensler

Wouldn't it be incredible if everyone could be purged, somehow, of the projected not-them badness that they internalized and perhaps have acted out because their souls have been so damaged? Wouldn't it be incredible if everyone could find the joy that comes with committing to our own goodness? Perhaps we would stop dividing ourselves into malignancies of various forms. — Eve Ensler

What we all have to know is the struggle is long. It's long. It may not end in our lifetimes. But the struggle is what gives our lives meaning and purpose. I tell people to take time out of activism every day to take care of their bodies, to take care of their souls and spirits. — Eve Ensler

The world has done that already - possessed the Congo and pillaged her and dominated her and robbed her of agency and occupation. Love is something else, something rising and contagious and surprising. It isn't aware of itself. It isn't keeping track. It isn't something you sign for. It's endless and generous and enveloping. It's in the drums, in the voices, in the bodies of the wounded made suddenly whole, by the music, by each other, dancing. — Eve Ensler

I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite. — 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. — Eve Ensler

I think so much of neoliberalism and capitalism has caused people to live in a state of greed, fear and consumption that is covering up so much of what we really want. — Eve Ensler

If you are divided from your body, then you are divided from the body of the world. — Eve Ensler

You have visits, then you have disappearances. You enter, then you exit. You come, you go. It would be so great if you could just get to human enlightenment on a linear path. — Eve Ensler

Some days I would get so exhausted, nauseous, in pain - just from going back through things. It's almost as if I had the experience and then the meta-experience. — Eve Ensler

The more I talked about it, the more objectified and fragmented my body became. It became entertainment; it became a new kind of commodity, something I was selling. — Eve Ensler

In America, we have to really be working on two fronts right now. Immediately, we have to be rising in resistance and protecting our Muslim brothers and sisters [and] every marginalized person under threat and siege. At the same time, we have to be planning and envisioning where we're going. How we build moments and movements, how we come up with the vision we want of a progressive left - that's what comes in after. — Eve Ensler

I think the thing that has always made me happy is being in the struggle, in a community of struggle with other people. — Eve Ensler

I really believe that is helping people. I've been talking to oncologists about how we can re-frame and re-think the chemo process, so it becomes a much more spiritual, psychological journey. Where people really could burn away what needs to be burned away. It's happening anyway. Why not frame it in a psychological way where it can serve as a transformation? — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

I think we have to get bolder. Why after Fukushima didn't we all go out and shut down all the nuclear power plants and stay there until it happened? — Eve Ensler

Why don't we bring everyone up to be caring and compassionate, to believe that we are connected with everyone and everything around us? — Eve Ensler

I think we need to teach pleasure. What beautiful touch means. What reciprocity means. What being connected and what intimacy means. Boys get out there at a young age and the performance posturing is so great and ends up being hard and aggressive. — Eve Ensler

I think when people begin to tell their stories, everything changes, because not only are you legitimized in the telling of your story and are you found, literally, like you matter, you exist in the telling of your story, but when you hear your story be told, you suddenly exist in community and with others. — Eve Ensler

If I had a dream it would be to think, What would it be like for everybody to have the kind of health care I had? What would that feel like? How would that be, to live in that world? Because I'll tell you, to be really, really sick, and to not have money. That is terrifying. And in my opinion, a travesty. — Eve Ensler

I think to be honest, that being is inside. I meet that being in so many people that I meet everywhere in the world and when I do meet that being, in other people, what I want to ask is "How do we keep opening ourselves so that we can become as vulnerable and as willing to live in the deepest complexity and ambiguity and truth that we can? — Eve Ensler

There are three billion women in the world who have vaginas. I don't think we can stop fighting for our sexual liberation, for our right to control our bodies. But at the same time as we're doing that, we have to also be fighting for the rights of trans women and standing up for them and making sure that we're always providing platforms for them and listening to their concerns in solidarity. — Eve Ensler

It [the memoir "In The Body of the World"] wrote me. I joke about it, but this book was so unusual. It just started to come out. I really feel like it came straight from my body. I think it was both an expression of what I had gone through, but also it just felt like everything had come together in my body and it needed to tell that story. — Eve Ensler

Maybe being good isn't about getting rid of anything. Maybe being good has to do with living in the mess in the frailty in the failures in the flaws. Maybe what I tried to get rid of is the goodest part of me. Think Passion. Think Age. Think Round. Maybe good is about developing the capacity to live fully inside everything. Our body is our country, the only city, the only village, the only every we will ever know. — Eve Ensler

I believe in irony. And if V-Day has taught me anything, it's that if you go out with artistic, outrageous irony and humor, people are drawn to it. — Eve Ensler

I think we have a tendency in America to keep dividing ourselves, separating ourselves from each other. — Eve Ensler

Trauma dissociates us from the parts of our body that are wounded, so we have to leave our whole body. It's a journey you take your whole life, that coming back in, re-landing in your body, in your self, on the Earth. I think one of the reasons it's been so easy, in a way, for us to violate both women and the Earth is this profound dissociation that exists in everyone. — Eve Ensler

For me, so much of my life has been this attempt to find my way back into my body. I tried various forms, from promiscuity, to eating disorders, to performance art. And I think it wasn't until I got cancer, where I was suddenly being pricked and ported and chemoed and operated on, that I suddenly just became body. I was just a body. And it was in that, in that finally landing in myself that I really discovered the world in my body. — Eve Ensler

Look, you do everything in stages, right? I don't think everything happens at once. There are so many layers we are constantly chipping away at, down and down and down, closer and closer to what would be the body. I think what happened with cancer, was that I woke up out of nine hours of surgery and I was body. I was just body. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

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

I really do think how we frame things determines so much of our experience, and I've been talking to a lot of oncologists, like, why don't we call them transformation suites and give people transformation juice and have guides that support people when they're going through chemo so you could actually burn away what needs to be burned away, as opposed to this dread, terror, horror, which is a very different experience. — Eve Ensler

If you look at capitalism and patriarchy, they're both such hierarchical, competitive, oneupmanship systems. They've trained us all [to think] that power means having all the goods or having the most money or having the most attention or having the most fame. That's not the power that interests me. Actually, the deconstruction of that power is what interests me. — Eve Ensler

We get off track. Capitalism takes us off track. You get off the "real" and get on the "wheel." The "wheel" becomes the winning and losing, the succeeding and failing, the "I will achieve." All that stuff becomes so preoccupying, particularly if you're born with low self-esteem, or no sense of yourself, or even if you're just born in the consumer culture. It's very powerful. — Eve Ensler

The U.N. now says that one out of three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime; we're talking about the desecration of the primary resource of the planet. — Eve Ensler

I think to be cut off from your heart is the greatest tyranny in the world. — Eve Ensler

Rock-and-roll was an example of change in the body of the culture. I think it's really what helped bring the anti-war movement to its peak and moved people into the streets to seize the day - the movement was the embodiment of what was happening in the music. This is what taught me that it was possible to bring art and activism together. Without that piece, that energetic embodiment piece, the rest is just intellectual construct. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

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!" — Eve Ensler

It really occurred to me at a certain point: women have not been embodied. Feminism has not been embodied. It hasn't gotten into us in a way where it is so undeniable that there is nothing to prove. Do you know what I mean? That we are so in our feminist skin, so to speak, that we are that world now. — Eve Ensler

If you just look at the fact that a woman was central in twittering the Cairo revolution, and women were central to the Tunisian uprising. Women are at the center of everything right now and moving everything forward. And I do think in the next year or two, we are going to see such a woman spring, such a rising. — Eve Ensler

I'm feeling a kind of liberty to write about what's interesting to me without worrying about what I should be writing about. And that feels good. — Eve Ensler

Dancing in public spaces and moving your body freely in a public space is reclaiming what was taken from you when you were violated. The energy of that - you can't capture it, you can't own it. Capitalists can't buy it.It can't be sold. It can't be monetized. And that's why I think it's so powerful. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

When you listen to other women’s stories, you begin to understand your own better, and you begin to find ways back through and with each other. — Eve Ensler

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. — Eve Ensler

…find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us, but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us. — Eve Ensler

Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether. — Eve Ensler

I really want to help stop violence toward women. — Eve Ensler

Life Lessons by Eve Ensler

1. Eve Ensler teaches us to have courage and be resilient in the face of adversity. She encourages us to speak our truth and fight for what we believe in, even when it is difficult.
2. She also reminds us to be compassionate and understanding towards others, no matter their background or beliefs.
3. Finally, Eve Ensler encourages us to take action and use our voices to make a difference in the world.