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.Collection: Distance
I think what all of us have in common is that we've been taught and trained and programmed to focus on fixing and mutilating ourselves. That's a core reason why women do not have power in the world.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Kindness
I got to a nine-hour surgery, I lost lots of body parts and rearranged, I got really months of infection that I lost 30 pounds. But the idea of pumping poison into my bloodstream just - I couldn't, I couldn't.Collection: Ideas
Why don't we bring everyone up to be caring and compassionate, to believe that we are connected with everyone and everything around us?Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Father
Freedom, that's the kind of power I'm interested in. When we help each other get free, then it's not about anybody being on top or anybody being on the bottom. It's about being together, in a community.Collection: Community
This artistic uprising we had the other night in Washington Square park: there was poetry, there was dance, there was song, there was spoken word; and people left feeling so inspired and so energised. We have to get ourselves out of this syndrome of trauma and being re-traumatised. Art releases this energy. It exposes us to wonder again, and magic again, and ambiguity - all the things we need to really keep going and fighting and resisting in these times.Collection: Song
I'd stop calling it "chemotherapy." I'd call it "transformational juice." Infusion suites would become "transformational suites" or "journey rooms."Collection: Journey
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.Collection: Thinking
There is a beautiful expression in Nicaragua: "struggle is the highest form of song". I love that. We are in the struggle. It's like a river. Once you step into it you become the river. It's not, you go out and click on a couple of charities that you believe in, march in the Women's March, and you're done. Struggle becomes your life, transforming a paradigm that is based on domination into a paradigm of co-operation. Fighting for the liberation of women, of people of color, of indigenous people, of lgbtq communities. Fighting to protect immigrants and assuring the safety of refugees.Collection: Beautiful
…find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us, but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.Collection: Protect
The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, controls women, diminishes women and keeps women in their so-called place.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Country
stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world!Collection: Empowering
Success itself doesn't give you happiness. It's what you do with your success that gives you happiness.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Theatre
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Joy
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Insecure
Dance is holy, sexual, and it's a way of being very powerful and a little dangerous without being violent.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Writing
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!Collection: Cancer
What I have found is that even when you try to transform existing structures they are so powerful they often overwhelm, seduce, and control you.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Class
We have to know people who are outside of our own circle, we have to reach out to people we don't know, we have to protect people who are in tremendous danger. And we also have to not get burned out and let our fear and anxiety and depression sink us. So there's lots of things we have to do right now!Collection: Circles
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.Collection: Numbers
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 .Collection: Thinking
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?Collection: Men
The devastation of neoliberalism is so multi-fold, whether it's violence against women or desperate economic inequality or the destruction of the planet.Collection: Economic Inequality
We live in a racist world. Everywhere there is racism. We say to White people, "You really have to examine how you behave in the world. You are responsible for deconstructing internalized racism and being part of a ongoing process of decolonizing yourself.Collection: White
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.Collection: Children
I honestly never understood how violence against women became a women's issue. 95 percent of the violence men are doing to women.Collection: Men
When you bring consciousness to anything, things begin to shift.Collection: Consciousness
The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure.Collection: Purpose
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.Collection: Numbers
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.Collection: Successful
You have to give to the world the thing that you want the most, in order to fix the broken parts inside you.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Reality
I was a young feminist in the '70s. Feminism saved my life. It gave me a life. But I saw how so much of what people were saying was not matching up with what they were doing. For example, we were talking about sister solidarity, and women were putting each other down. We were talking about standing up for our rights, and women weren't leaving abusive relationships with men. There were just so many disconnects.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Talking