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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

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Eve Ensler
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: May 25
Actor
Artist
Author
Autobiographer
Feminist
Playwright
Writer
New York City
New York
Trained
Educate
Activate
Girls
Verb
Please
Enforced
Create
Defy
Girl
Verbs
Change
Confront
Engage

More quotes by Eve Ensler

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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
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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.
Eve Ensler
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I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time. I don't think it's one motion unfortunately - I wish we could say it's better, better, better - but I think it's better, bad, better, bad - you know?
Eve Ensler
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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
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Stop trying to fix your body. It was never broken.
Eve Ensler
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I think to be cut off from your heart is the greatest tyranny in the world.
Eve Ensler
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When you bring consciousness to anything, things begin to shift.
Eve Ensler
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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
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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
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We're always learning. We're all in the process of decolonizing ourselves - removing all the parts of us that are sexist, homophobic, transphobic, racist. I mean, everybody in society needs to be in this process because everybody's been brought up in a misogynist, racist, homophobic, transphobic culture.
Eve Ensler
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Decide whether you want to be liked or admired.
Eve Ensler
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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
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I feel passionate about nurses. I would do anything for nurses. Anything.
Eve Ensler
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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