Top 140 Eve Ensler Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I started thinking about how it’s actually hard to love Barbie the way she is now. She is very tough, so much plastic. She’s not cuddly at all. She can’t even put her arms around you. You have to do things for her: worship her, dress her, buy her things. She wants everything. She is very greedy and needy. That’s how they get you to spend more money.”

— Eve Ensler

102. “I feel passionate about nurses. I would do anything for nurses. Anything.”

— Eve Ensler

103. “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 .”

— Eve Ensler

104. “Decide whether you want to be liked or admired.”

— Eve Ensler

105. “People ask me all the time how I survived. It wasn’t that I was smarter or even stronger than anyone else. I didn’t even know what I was doing. It was just that something inside me couldn’t go along.”

— Eve Ensler

106. “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.”

— Eve Ensler

107. “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

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

— Eve Ensler

109. “We are able to cross and dissolve all kinds of borders if we are willing to go to the political, emotional, and spiritual places we most fear and resist.”

— Eve Ensler

110. “Each admission here defies a blood vow determined long before my birth. An apologist is a traitor of the highest order. How many men, how many fathers ever admit to failures or offenses? The act itself is a betrayal of the basic code. It sprays shrapnel of guilt in all directions. If one of us is wrong, the whole structure and story come tumbling down. Our silence is our bond. The power of not telling, of not letting on, is the most ancient and powerful weapon in our arsenal.”

— Eve Ensler

111. “There’s an underlying puritanicalness in America that is not that different to the prudishness of Britain – it just manifests itself in different ways.”

— Eve Ensler

112. “I did not want to see how careless this whole system is for so many, how easy it is to fall through the cracks.”

— Eve Ensler

113. “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

114. “To have insurance and have a diagnosis and to have doctors, I just felt it would be immoral on some level to complain.”

— Eve Ensler

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Eve Ensler

118. “I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.”

— Eve Ensler

119. “As the Taliban circled the bazaar in their Toyota pickup trucks, the ice cream is no longer my enemy. Sunita is risking her life for this pleasure. She is sharing it with me. Finally, my being fat is clearly less important than being free. I eat the ice cream.”

— Eve Ensler

120. “Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women – that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life.”

— Eve Ensler

121. “What is a man cast out of the kingdom of men?”

— Eve Ensler

122. “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

123. “I say it because I believe that what we don’t say we don’t see, acknowledge, or remember. What we don’t say becomes a secret, and secrets often create shame and fear and myths. I say it because I want to someday feel comfortable saying it, and not ashamed and guilty.”

— Eve Ensler

124. “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.”

— Eve Ensler

125. “She told me my clitoris is not something I could lose. It was me, the essence of me. It was both the doorbell to my house and the house itself. I didn’t have to find it. I had to be it. Be it. Be my clitoris. Be my clitoris.”

— Eve Ensler

126. “I think violence against women in America has become ordinary – it’s been made absolutely acceptable.”

— Eve Ensler

127. “We don’t accept your world your rules your wars We don’t accept your cruelty and unkindness. We don’t believe some need to suffer for others to survive or that there isn’t enough to go around or that corporations are the only and best economic arrangement. And.”

— Eve Ensler

128. “I think one of the problems with the capitalist mainstream is this: no matter what you create to respond or resist it they will buy it.”

— Eve Ensler

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

— Eve Ensler

130. “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

131. “I began to see my body like an iPad or a car. I would drive it and demand things from it. It had no limits. It was invincible. It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself.”

— Eve Ensler

132. “We have to say that what happens to women matters to everyone and it matters a lot.”

— Eve Ensler

133. “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

134. “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

135. “How come we have money to kill but no money to feed or heal? How come we have money to destroy but no money for art and schools? The.”

— Eve Ensler

136. “I really want to help stop violence toward women.”

— Eve Ensler

137. “About violence, what it feels like to be nothing to someone else. What it feels like to be a consequence of someone else’s dissociated rage, disconnected fury.”

— Eve Ensler

138. “It is where we do not live that the dying comes.”

— Eve Ensler

139. “Finding violence against women means opening to the great power of women, the mystery of women, the heart of women, the wild unending sexuality and creativity of women – and not being afraid.”

— Eve Ensler

140. “The trick has been to live in the contradictions while maintaining principles, beliefs, and purpose.”

— Eve Ensler

141. “Hysteria – a word to make women feel insane for knowing what they know.”

— Eve Ensler

142. “So much of life, it seems to me, is the framing and naming of things.”

— Eve Ensler

143. “The question is not: Will you die? The question is which you needs to die off, so that the new self can live and thrive in a new, loving world.”

— Eve Ensler

144. “When the world is right, it will be the unpaid and unsung people like Cindy who will be the honored ones, the ones who get paid the most, and they will sit at the big table. When the world is right, it will be these invisible people who we see and cherish.”

— Eve Ensler

145. “Doctors never believe how simple it is to give patients dignity. It takes a sentence. It takes a short walk around a table.”

— Eve Ensler

146. “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?”

— Eve Ensler

147. “Twelve years old. I was happy. My friend had a Ouija board, asked when we were going to get our periods, looked down, and I saw blood.”

— Eve Ensler

148. “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