Firestone Quotes & Sayings

[U]nless oppressed groups stick together, and on alliances of self interest rather than do-goodism; nothing can be accomplished in the long run to dismantle the apparatus of oppression. — Shulamith Firestone

If women are differentiated only by superficial physical attributes, men appear more individual and irreplaceable than they really are. — Shulamith Firestone

We need to know why NHTSA, which has officials who are paid to do nothing else but monitor accidents, have been asleep at the wheel when it had information served up to it on a silver platter by State Farm Insurance Company which would suggest grave problems with Firestone tires, — Fred Upton

If you meet me on the street you should hurry on without a backward glance, and later when you climb into bed beside a happy girl with simple thoughts and stroke her perfect hair with fingers that are still shaky from our near-miss, you can whisper that you had a brush with death today, darling, and somehow lived. — Julie Johnson

I believe fundamental honesty is the keystone of business. — Harvey S. Firestone

Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle. — Shulamith Firestone

The purpose of the false self is to defend against pain - not deal with reality — Robert W. Firestone

In my own case, I had to train myself out of that phony smile, which is like a nervous tic on every teenage girl. And this meant that I smiled rarely, for in truth, when it came down to real smiling, I had less to smile about. My 'dream' action for the women's liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their 'pleasing' smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them. — Shulamith Firestone

To be worshiped is not freedom. — Shulamith Firestone

We live in a largely addictive society that continues to reinforce the defenses we learned as children; this reinforcement comes in the form of a negative social pressure to soothe ourselves, to try to obtain instant gratification ... Many people who suffered deprivation in childhood continue to accept substitute gratifications in the forms of drugs, alcohol, tobacco, television, video games, overwork, and other activities that distract them from experiencing their real lives. — Lisa Firestone

That's my point. If you view the world as gross, you'll never be able to enjoy it. — Carrie Firestone

And soon I'll return to the white rose of Yorkshire, where the sky bathes my soul with a watering can. — Carrie Firestone

It is only the failure of my plots I fear. — Shulamith Firestone

Maybe heaven is another dimension, and our dreams are a portal. — Carrie Firestone

To the extent that we retain the critical attitudes and destructive elements we have incorporated into our own personalities, we remain undifferentiated from our parents throughout our lifetime. — Lisa Firestone

Differentiation is a universal struggle that all human beings face if they wish to fully develop themselves as individuals. — Lisa Firestone

You don't need some vintage thing with another woman's secrets stuck to the seams. — Carrie Firestone

Mom always says to leave him alone, that he's an introvert and he needs to get his energy from a quiet place inside himself and that she can relate. I think he gets his energy from paint fumes and really good wee. — Carrie Firestone

No matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper. — Shulamith Firestone

The demands of Sex Privatization contradict the demands of the Beauty Ideal, causing the severe feminine neurosis about personal appearance. — Shulamith Firestone

Our company is built on people - those who work for us, and those we do business with. — Harvey S. Firestone

He has let her in not because he genuinely loved her, but only because she played so well into his preconceived fantasies. — Shulamith Firestone

Success is the sum of details. — Harvey S. Firestone

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

Women were the slave class that maintained the species in order to free the other half for the business of the world ... — Shulamith Firestone

Men are thinking, writing, and creating, because women were pouring their energy into those men; women are not creating culture because they are occupied with love. — Shulamith Firestone

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

Without differentiating from parents or caretakers we may never succeed in living our own lives. — Lisa Firestone

Capital isn't that important in business. Experience isn't that important. You can get both of these things. What is important is ideas. — Harvey S. Firestone

The way of the pioneer is always rough. — Harvey S. Firestone

Love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon
it becomes complicated, corrupted or obstructed by an unequal balance of power. — Shulamith Firestone

People tried to force me to feel better. But the only things that worked were time and distraction. Distract yourself. Stay busy. Count marshmallows, study frogs, whatever it takes. Time heals all wounds. It just does. — Carrie Firestone

The classic trap for any revolutionary is always, "What's your alternative?" But even if you could provide the interrogator with a blueprint, this does not mean he would use it: in most cases he is not sincere in wanting to know. In fact this is a common offensive, a technique to reflect revolutionary anger and turn it against itself. Moreover, the oppressed have no job to convince all people. All they need know is that the present system is destroying them. — Shulamith Firestone

To those who would love me - I offer you a warning. Do no get to close. You won't survive. — Julie Johnson

Believe me, if all wives whose husbands had affairs left them, we would only have divorced women in this country. — Shulamith Firestone

In general, an ideal partner is (a) open and nondefensive, (b) honest and nonduplicitous, (c) affectionate and easy-going, (d) mentally and physically healthy, (e) independent and successful in his or her chosen career or lifestyle, and (f) aware of a meaningful existence that includes humanitarian values. — Robert W. Firestone

I can walk through the front door of any factory and out the back and tell you if it's making money or not. I can just tell by the way it's being run and by the spirit of the workers. — Harvey S. Firestone

The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF! — Shulamith Firestone

Whichever it is, he does not question it, not understanding that his own behavior has been or could be a determining influence. — Shulamith Firestone

In order for people to live their own lives and fulfill their destiny, they must differentiate themselves from destructive environmental influences. — Lisa Firestone

I am awestruck that life can give us such breathtaking beauty. — Carrie Firestone

The average person is unaware that he or she is living out a negative destiny according to his or her past (childhood) programming, preserving his or her familiar identity, and, in the process, pushing love away. On an unconscious level, many people sense that if they did not push love away, the whole world, as they have experienced it, would be shattered and they would not know who they were. — Robert W. Firestone

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

It would take a denial of all cultural tradition for women to produce even a true 'female' art. For a woman who participates in (male) culture must achieve and be rated by standards of a tradition she had no part in making - and certainly there is no room in that tradition for a female view, even if she could discover what it was. — Shulamith Firestone

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

In science, a dead end is just a place to change direction. — Richard Firestone

It is a full-time job to cope with alien elements from both interpersonal sources and societal influences. — Lisa Firestone

If you have ideas, you have the main asset you need, and there isn't any limit to what you can do with your business and your life. Ideas are any man's greatest asset. — Harvey S. Firestone

When one of the children of his friend Harvey Firestone boasted that he had some savings in the bank, Ford lectured the child. That money was idle. What the child should do, Ford said, was spend the money on tools. "Make something," he admonished. "Create something. — David Halberstam

We have to imagine something before we can build the infrastructure that will allow it to exist. We have failed here on both fronts: in imagination and in reality. Our great weirdos, from Emily Dickinson to Simone Weil to Coco Chanel, are seen as outliers, as not relevant to the way we think through what we want out of life. It's the same way we discuss radical feminist writers like Dworkin and Firestone. Dworkin is unhinged, Firestone is too eccentric to be taken seriously. — Jessa Crispin

That is why in adult life, people generally tend to relive rather than live, that is, to repeat the patterns of the past and defend the primary fantasy in the defiance, and avoid the real gamble or real adventure of taking a chance on something new. They are afraid that if they really cry out, if they really ask, if they really scream for help, that it won't come, and they'll be in the same panicky frightened state they were in when they were little. — Robert W. Firestone

The separation of sex from emotion is at the very foundations of Western culture and civilization. — Shulamith Firestone

They implicitly trust that their thoughts, beliefs, and feelings are their own, and fail to recognize that they may be "channeling" someone else's thoughts and feelings. — Lisa Firestone

People must come to the understanding that they do not have a fixed identity. They have the power to identify and alter features of their personalities that they find negative or unpleasant. — Lisa Firestone

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

All men are selfish, brutal and inconsiderate
and I wish I could find one. — Shulamith Firestone

The 'natural' is not necessarily a 'human' value. Humanity has begun to transcend nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it. — Shulamith Firestone

You get the best out of others when you get the best out of yourself. — Harvey S. Firestone

The secret of my success is a two word answer: Know people. — Harvey S. Firestone

An executive cannot gradually dismiss details. Business is made up of details and I notice that the chief executive who dismisses them is quite likely to dismiss his business. Success is the sum of detail. It might perhaps be pleasing to imagine oneself beyond detail and engaged only in great things, but as I have often observed, if one attends only to great things and lets the little things pass the great things become little; that is, the business shrinks. — Harvey S. Firestone

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 pain of losing doesn't get less with each person I lose. But I have the wisdom of knowing the pain isn't forever. That fades. The memories stay. And the love isn't going anywhere. — Carrie Firestone

The myth of childhood happiness flourishes so wildly not because it satisfies the needs of children but because it satisfies the needs of adults. In a culture of alienated people, the belief that everyone has at least one good period in life free of care and drudgery dies hard. And obviously you can't expect it in your old age. So it must be you've already had it. — Shulamith Firestone

Romanticism is a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their conditions. — Shulamith Firestone

Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature. Many women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know. — Shulamith Firestone

Thought, not money, is the real business capital. — Harvey S. Firestone

When children are hurt and in pain psychologically, they don't want to be in distress, so when the situation becomes intolerable, they cease to identify with themselves. When they feel the most threatened, they will choose to identify with the person who is the source of their suffering in an attempt to possess that person's strength. — Robert Firestone

Next time we're on the couch, zoning out in front of the tube, we'll be wondering why we're wasting precious time when we could be making extraordinary moments. — Carrie Firestone

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

We should keep in mind that Revolutions anywhere are always glad to use any help they can get, even from women. But unless women also use the Revolution to further their own interests as well as everyone else's, unless they make it consistently clear that all help given now is expected to be returned, both now and after the Revolution, they will be sold out again and again ... — Shulamith Firestone

Take the pain and grow beauty...You know I've always loved volcanoes. I love how they spew searing, deadly lava that goes on to nurture the most beautiful landscapes on earth. It's from searing pain that the deepest beauty can sprout — Carrie Firestone

A destructive thought process exists within all of us, and we are plagued to varying degrees by an internal dialogue that is harmful, restrictive, and at its ultimate extreme, self-destructive. — Lisa Firestone

The end goal of feminist revolution must be ... not just the elimination of male privilage but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. — Shulamith Firestone

The personal is political. — Shulamith Firestone

The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership. — Harvey S. Firestone

Cheers to all the fun we've had. There are no words for the joy you have brought me. I love you, honey. — Carrie Firestone

The patriarchal family was only the most recent in a string of 'primary' social organizations, all of which defined woman as a different species due to her unique childbearing capacity. The term family was first used by the Romans to denote a social unit the head of which ruled over wife, children, and slaves - under Roman law he was invested with the rights of life and death over them all; famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the total number of slaves belonging to one man. — Shulamith Firestone

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

I've been thinking about Skinny Dave. I wonder if he's in heaven, up past the glittery constellations, in some paradise-shaped other dimension. I want him to be there, far away from the demons that betrayed him. — Carrie Firestone

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

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

(Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity. — Shulamith Firestone

The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer. — Shulamith Firestone

Differentiating from parental introjects and psychological defences based on the emotional pain of childhood is essential not only for neurotic or seriously disturbed individuals; it is a central developmental issue in every person's life. — Lisa Firestone

It is only as we develop others that we permanently succeed. — Harvey S. Firestone

Our real self is under siege by our anti-self. — Lisa Firestone

We can best help our children not by sacrificing ourselves for them, but by trying to fulfill our own lives. When we are involved in an honest pursuit of our own goals, we serve as positive role models for our children. — Lisa Firestone

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

For the real issue under all the fights about other women is the man is unable to commit himself. — Shulamith Firestone

Be patient, kiddo. It'll come." He turns and faces me. "You know when you fall and get a big old bruise on your leg? That bruise isn't going anywhere for a while. But it takes longer to heal if you're pressing on it all the time." I motion for him to wait while I grab napkins from the bar and blow my nose. "Be gentle with yourself. Listen to good music. Eat good food. Nourish your body and your spirit, and you'll be all right. — Carrie Firestone

The bar is the male kingdom. For centuries it was the bastion of male privilege, the gathering place for men away from their women, a place where men could go to freely indulge in The Bull Session. — Shulamith Firestone

In the radical feminist view, the new feminism is not just the revival of a serious political movement for social equality. It is the second wave of the most important revolution in history. Its aim: the overthrow of the oldest, most rigid class/caste system in existence, the class system based on sex - a system consolidated over thousands of years, lending the archetypal male and female roles and undeserved legitimacy and seeming permanence. — Shulamith Firestone

Making each day count — Bruce M. Firestone

Emancipated' women found out that the honesty, generosity, and camaraderie of men was a lie. — Shulamith Firestone

A fair and generous woman is (at best) respected, but seldom loved. — Shulamith Firestone