Eve Ensler Quotes

The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, controls women, diminishes women and keeps women in their so-called place.

When you bring consciousness to anything, things begin to shift.

I think that's part of the whole denial and suicidal mechanism [ of the human's race] right "Oh my God, the house is on fire." You sleep through the smoke.

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

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

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.

stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world!

...to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible so that can not be ravaged in the dark without great consequence.

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.

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."

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.

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.

We have no idea how many women were raped in wars - because no one ever asked. So sometimes when people say statistics have escalated, I wonder if, that is true or are we just hearing about things now that we didn't hear about before.

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 despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.

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.

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

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

Dance is holy, sexual, and it's a way of being very powerful and a little dangerous without being violent.

I think the human species is very suicidal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think violence against women in America has become ordinary - it's been made absolutely acceptable.

Terence McKenna says, "The culture is not your friend." I am not sure we can change this culture. But I think we can rise above it and create a new world. That's why I so deeply believe in alternative spaces. That's why I believe in the power of art and activism.

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.

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

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.

I want to touch you in real time not find you on YouTube, I want to walk next to you in the mountains not friend you on Facebook.

I am not saying people shouldn't be held accountable for terrible acts. But holding people in prisons does not necessarily make them responsible or accountable. It makes them bad. It makes them evil. It puts an end to any process of transformation. It hardens them spiritually and psychologically.

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.

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.

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!"

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.

Each time I had five hours of the poison going into me, I just pictured everything that needed to be burned away. I pictured wars, I pictured the things my father had done to me, I pictured brutality, and when it was over, I am light.

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

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."

What I would argue is that real spirituality is the ability to keep encountering two opposite thoughts at the same time and still maintain some kind of morality and perspective in the world. It is not the elimination of one side of the equation or the elimination of what you don't like; it is the investigation of everything.

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.

I really want to help stop violence toward women.

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.

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.

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.

I wake up every day and I think, 'I'm breathing! It's a good day.'

Since cancer, I feel like I have dreams rather than ambitions, visions rather than plans.