Germaine Greer Quotes (70 Quotes)


    There is no such thing as security. There never has been.

    Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

    In our society, the pre-adolescent girl, the nubile virgin, the sexually active woman, the mother and the grandmother are all expected to look and behave in the same way. The correct body outline for them all is girlish their voices should remain sweet and low, their manner accommodating. ... Kicking off leg-lengthening high-heeled shoes, wiping the colored grease off your lips, raising your voice, letting the grey come through your hair, ceasing the simper that lifts your cheeks and letting your jowls settle into disapproving shapes is seen as letting yourself go.

    I have always been principally interested in men for sex. I've always thought any sane woman would be a lover of women because loving men is such a mess. I have always wished I'd fall in love with a woman. Damn.

    Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.


    Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

    If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

    It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent ''celibacy,'' by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity ''backward.''

    Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.

    Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.

    The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.

    What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.

    Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.

    The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.

    Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

    Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.


    Love, love, love -- all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.

    The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behavior, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.

    Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.

    Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present. He that has no children brings them up well.

    Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.

    It is in our interests to let the police and their employers go on believing that the Underground is a conspiracy, because it increases their paranoia and their inability to deal with what is really happening. As long as they look for ringleaders and documents they will miss their mark, which is that proportion of every personality which belongs in the Underground.

    All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defense. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.

    One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.

    All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.

    A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.


    Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.

    Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting.

    Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let's get on with it.

    Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.

    The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.

    We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.

    The house wife is an unpaid employee in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee.

    The older woman's love is not love of herself, nor of herself mirrored in a lover's eyes, nor is it corrupted by need. It is a feeling of tenderness so still and deep and warm that it gilds every grass blade and blesses every fly. It includes the ones who have a claim on it, and a great deal else besides. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

    The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.


    The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.

    Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.

    Man made one grave mistake in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all it is time for the demolition to begin.

    I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.

    Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

    She became the character she was playing in an Ibsen play she'd stalk around with grey hair. She was also the meanest woman in the world.


    The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

    Woman cannot be content with health and agility she must make exorbitant efforts to appear something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate.

    Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?

    Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

    Maybe I couldn't make it. Maybe I don't have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky ass, a sexy voice. Maybe I don't know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I'm sick of the masquerade. I'm sick of pretending eternal youth. I'm sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I'm sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs I'm sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I'm sick of the Powder Room. I'm sick of pretending that some fatuous male's self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I'm sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I'm sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.


    More Germaine Greer Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Woman - Man - Love - World - Society & Civilization - Hair - Energy - Sex - Mothers - Security - Family - Value - Characters - Sadness - Revolution - Work & Career - Pleasure - Home - Danger & Risk - View All Germaine Greer Quotations

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    Noam Chomsky - Jose Rizal - Will Marshall - Wes Boyd - Susan B. Anthony - Rosa Parks - Malcolm X - Louis Farrakhan - Jimmy Hoffa - Gloria Steinem


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