Theoretical Quotes

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“...love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon--it becomes complicated, corrupted or obstructed by an unequal balance of power.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“(Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“If women are differentiated only by superficial physical attributes, men appear more individual and irreplaceable than they really are.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“He has let her in not because he genuinely loved her, but only because she played so well into his preconceived fantasies.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“A fair and generous woman is (at best) respected, but seldom loved.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“a revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo. And if it is your wife that is revolting, you can't just split to the suburbs. Feminism, when it truly achieves it's goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“Thus her whole identity hangs in the balance of her love life. She is allowed to love herself only if a man finds her worthy of love.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“To be worshiped is not freedom.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“...he will go to his grave feeling cheated, never realizing that there isn't much difference between one woman and the other, that it is the loving that creates the difference.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“It is only after we have integrated the dark side of the moon into our world view that we can begin to talk seriously of universal culture.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“...childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable. It is not fun.
(Like shitting a pumpkin, a friend of mine told me when I inquired about the Great-Experience-You-Are-Missing.)”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“Emancipated' women found out that the honesty, generosity, and camaraderie of men was a lie.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“A mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort 'belongs' to her.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“Love has never been understood, though it may have been fully experienced, and that experience communicated.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted…Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature…we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. [Final passage in "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, by Roland Barthes, Trans. Stephen Heath (1977)]”
― Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

“But in psychoanalysis there are no unimportant thoughts; there are only thoughts that pretend to be unimportant in order to not be told.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“Believe me, if all wives whose husbands had affairs left them, we would only have divorced women in this country.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“The demands of Sex Privatization contradict the demands of the Beauty Ideal, causing the severe feminine neurosis about personal appearance.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“The pervasion of image has so deeply altered our very relationships to ourselves that even men have become objects--if never erotic objects.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“...new theories and new movements do not develop in a vacuum, they arise to spearhead the necessary social solutions to new problems resulting from contradictions in the environment.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“It is only the failure of my plots I fear.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“Whichever it is, he does not question it, not understanding that his own behavior has been or could be a determining influence.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“For the real issue under all the fights about other women is the man is unable to commit himself.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“Genius is only gifted to the few who are ready to go beyond their comfort-zones. Those who are not satisfied only with the theoretical ideologies.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo, What They Asked Me: The Fear of Living and Dying Young

“If I keep observing the uranium, which means a little more than keeping my eyes on the pot on my desk and involves something akin to surrounding it with a whole system of Geiger counters, I can freeze it in such a way that it stops emitting radiation.
Although Turing first suggested the idea as a theoretical construct, it turns out that it is not just mathematical fiction. Experiments in the last decade have demonstrated the real possibility of using observation to inhibit the progress of a quantum system.”
― Marcus du Sautoy, The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science

“Would you appreciate a unicorn if they were as common as horses?”
― Faith Erin Hicks, Comics Will Break Your Heart

“Maybe he should apologise for the version of himself that would've accepted the loss of her life and filled a pen with her blood. But how exactly did one apologise for theoretical monstrosity? He wasn't very good at apologising for things he had done.”
― Emma Törzs, Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“The only way to make a picture into a theory is to take it overliterally, to treat it as if it were a theory and see how it needs to be refined.”
― William G Lycan, Philosophy of Language (text only) 2nd(Second) edition by W. G. Lycan