Success Quote by Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein is needling her reader with a line that sounds like a panicked moralist, then quickly reveals itself as something colder and more diagnostic. The repetition, unpunctuated and breathless, collapses three figures into one: the adolescent, the century, the revolutionary. It’s a deliberately comic escalation, suggesting that what we treat as grand historical rupture often shares a root with a teenager’s craving to blow up the household rules. Stein’s wit is in the flattening: ideology and puberty become neighboring dialects of the same impulse.

The phrase "destroy the family" lands like a provocation because it borrows the language of reactionary fear (the family as civilization’s last wall) while refusing to clarify whether destruction is monstrous or necessary. Stein’s subtext is that the family is not merely a cozy unit but a training ground for obedience, a machine that reproduces taste, class, gender roles, and inheritance. Wanting to smash it is, in this view, a desire to interrupt the loop. Yet she also implies a suspicion of revolutionary melodrama: the urge can be immature, overconfident, more fantasy than program.

Context matters. Writing out of a modernist milieu that challenged Victorian domesticity, and living openly with Alice B. Toklas, Stein knew the family as both social mandate and exclusionary gate. Her line works because it keeps two truths in tension: that rebellion begins at home, and that history’s loudest promises can sound eerily like a slammed bedroom door.