Parenting & Family Quote by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Revolution, for Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, isn’t a street costume or a posture; it’s a metaphysical claim on authorship. By comparing “true revolutionaries” to God, she deliberately courts the most dangerous kind of confidence: the belief that you don’t merely oppose a system, you generate a new reality with your fingerprints all over it. The line flatters, then instantly turns accusatory. If revolution is creation, then every creator is liable for what they make, and the “awesome responsibility” isn’t rhetorical thunder - it’s a moral invoice.

The subtext is a critique of romantic rebellion. Harrison is suspicious of revolutions that treat destruction as proof of purity. She shifts the locus of change inward: “create ourselves” comes before the future can be remade. That’s not self-help; it’s an ethical demand. Personal character becomes political infrastructure, the unseen architecture that decides whether a movement reproduces the cruelty it claims to overthrow.

Her most revealing move is “the image of goodness.” Not righteousness, not correctness, not ideology - goodness, a word that resists technical definitions. She’s arguing that the future isn’t secured by plans alone but by imagination disciplined by nobility: what we allow ourselves to picture as permissible, as admirable, as normal. In the late-20th-century context of ideological disillusionment and culture-war cynicism, Harrison’s provocation is bracing: the revolution worth having begins as a moral aesthetic, and its first battlefield is the self.