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I honestly never understood how violence against women became a women's issue. 95 percent of the violence men are doing to women.

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
Issues
Women
Never
Honestly
Men
Issue
Became
Understood
Percent
Violence

More quotes by Eve Ensler

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I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.
Eve Ensler
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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
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When I wrote 'The Good Body,' I turned 40 and suddenly had this stomach. It seemed like the end of the world. Because I didn't value my body. I was constantly judging it, but I also didn't live in it.
Eve Ensler
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It really occurred to me at a certain point: women have not been embodied. Feminism has not been embodied. It hasn't gotten into us in a way where it is so undeniable that there is nothing to prove. Do you know what I mean? That we are so in our feminist skin, so to speak, that we are that world now.
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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The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, controls women, diminishes women and keeps women in their so-called place.
Eve Ensler
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Some days I would get so exhausted, nauseous, in pain - just from going back through things. It's almost as if I had the experience and then the meta-experience.
Eve Ensler
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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.
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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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
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I think the greatest illusion we have is that denial protects us. It's actually the biggest distortion and lie. In fact, staying asleep is what's killing us.
Eve Ensler
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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
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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
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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
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What I believe is that we have this extraordinary spirit inside ourselves, which for me is our Buddha nature. I believe we are in the process of opening and getting closer and closer to our Buddha nature and stripping away all that is covering it. I don't think I'm going to end up meeting this one being up there or out there.
Eve Ensler
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One of the things I think about when we talk about a violence,and relationship to spirituality is that it seems to me when you take something from someone that isn't yours or you hurt someone else, fundamentally, you actually do that to yourself. You actually unmake yourself, you work against your own being and your own matter.
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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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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Decide whether you want to be liked or admired.
Eve Ensler
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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