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Quotes from The Dialectic of Sex — Shulamith Firestone

1945–2012 Canada

← All quotes by Shulamith Firestone

43 quotes

Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Love has never been understood, though it may have been fully experienced, and that experience communicated.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

To live without love in the end proves intolerable to men just as it does to women.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Self-regulation is the basis of freedom, and dependence the origin of inequality.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

The goals of feminism can never be achieved through evolution, but only through revolution. Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Every person in his first trip to a foreign country, where he knows neither the people nor the language, experiences childhood.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

If any revolutionary movement can succeed at establishing an egalitarian structure, radical feminism will.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

An artist can never know in advance just how his vision might be articulated in reality.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

New theories and new movements do not develop in a vacuum, they arise to spearhead the necessary social solutions to contradictions in the environment.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Radical goals must be kept in sight at all times.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

It is everywhere. The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself: modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Misuse of science has often obscured the value of science itself.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Radical feminist movement has many political assets that no other movement can claim, a revolutionary potential far higher, as well as qualitatively different, from any in the past.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

A revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo. And if it’s your wife who is revolting, you can’t just split to the suburbs.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Most revolutionary movements are unable to practise among themselves what they preach. Strong leadership cults, factionalism, ‘ego-tripping’, backbiting are the rule rather than the exception.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

The most important characteristic to be maintained in any revolution is flexibility.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

The fact remains: childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable. It is not fun.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

The fifties was the bleakest decade of all, perhaps the bleakest in some centuries for women.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

To grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based is not to lose our case. We are no longer just animals. And the Kingdom of Nature does not reign absolute.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

The family is neither private nor a refuge, but is directly connected to – is even the cause of – the ills of the larger society which the individual is no longer able to confront.

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Shulamith Firestone (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.