Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Eve Ensler

Image
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.
Eve Ensler
Image
In America, we have a government that is now run by white nationalists, by billionaires, by incredible misogynists.
Eve Ensler
Image
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.
Eve Ensler
Image
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.
Eve Ensler
Image
Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.
Eve Ensler
Image
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.
Eve Ensler
Image
I think we need to teach pleasure. What beautiful touch means. What reciprocity means. What being connected and what intimacy means. Boys get out there at a young age and the performance posturing is so great and ends up being hard and aggressive.
Eve Ensler
Image
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.
Eve Ensler
Image
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
Image
We have not yet made violence against women abnormal, extraordinary, unacceptable. We have not yet come to see it as a pathological issue.
Eve Ensler
Image
I wake up every day and I think, 'I'm breathing! It's a good day.'
Eve Ensler
Image
I think about Marvin Gaye and 'Sexual Healing.' What a radical idea that sex was healing. I learned my politics through that music.
Eve Ensler
Image
If I had a dream it would be to think, What would it be like for everybody to have the kind of health care I had? What would that feel like? How would that be, to live in that world? Because I'll tell you, to be really, really sick, and to not have money. That is terrifying. And in my opinion, a travesty.
Eve Ensler
Image
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?
Eve Ensler
Image
Since cancer, I feel like I have dreams rather than ambitions, visions rather than plans.
Eve Ensler
Image
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
Image
I'm in good shape. My cancer means I have lost a lot of organs and I'm a lot lighter. I have devoted myself to yoga and I'm doing handstands.
Eve Ensler
Image
Success itself doesn't give you happiness. It's what you do with your success that gives you happiness.
Eve Ensler
Image
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
Image
I really want to help stop violence toward women.
Eve Ensler