Eve Ensler Quotes

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.

I have been a depressed person most of m life. I was always in the throes of self-hatred.

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.

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.

When we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us.

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.

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.

We have not yet made violence against women abnormal, extraordinary, unacceptable. We have not yet come to see it as a pathological issue.

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.

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.

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.

In the United States, the last recorded clitoridectomy for curing masturbation was performed in 1948--on a five year old girl.

Geography does not define you - love does.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn't exist.

I honestly never understood how violence against women became a women's issue.

95 percent of the violence men are doing to women.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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!

I am so grateful to be alive. It's ridiculous to be alive.

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.

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.

Unless men are active allies, we'll never end violence against women and girls.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Money doesn't make you special, it makes you lucky. Be generous, be crazy, be outrageous.

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."

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.

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

The only point of having power it seems to me is to empower others.

The only point of leadership is to inspire.

I think we just have to look at all the ways in which we are violating the Earth, each other, economic violence, racial violence, environmental violence - where we are dominating and not cooperating .

I think it was a realization of this cancer, an understanding of the broader implications of what cancer is. The greed, the ravaging of lands and seas for profit, the taking of things that don't belong to us; what we've done to the environment in this fast-paced, careless hunger. I think all of that was happening in my body.

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

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.

Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma.

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.

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.

Cancer was the most terrifying, arduous, painful thing, but it was also a profound gift in the sense that I was holding so much in my body for so many years that was dark and terrifying which was preventing my coming back into myself.

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?

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.

The minute someone tells you you have cancer, it's kind of like you die.

You really do die. It's like you get that you're mortal.