Top 100 Germaine Greer Quotes
#1. Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.
Germaine Greer
#2. The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all woman. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others.
Germaine Greer
#3. Kinkiness comes from low energy. It's the substitution of lechery for lust.
Germaine Greer
#4. One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
Germaine Greer
#5. Cunt-lapping, mother-fucking, and cock-sucking are words to provoke a sense of outrage. Being forced to play the role of a woman in sexual intercourse is the deepest imaginable humiliation, which is only worsened if the victim finds to his horror that he enjoys it.
Germaine Greer
#6. 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?
Germaine Greer
#7. Once a paper admits any principle of censorship for survival, the we-don't-want-to-do-it-but-we-don't-want-to-lose-the-printer kind of censorship, it jeopardizes the integrity of its editorial principle. It's better to print and be damned, because you'll be damned anyway.
Germaine Greer
#8. If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion.
Germaine Greer
#9. 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.
Germaine Greer
#10. Gillard is as likeable as Rudd is charmless. She is self-deprecating; he is ludicrously vainglorious. She is a mistress of understatement; he is a ranter.
Germaine Greer
#11. Until woman as she is can drive this plastic spectre out of her own and her man's imagination she will continue to apologize and disguise herself, while accepting her male's pot-belly, wattles, bad breath, farting, stubble, baldness and other ugliness without complaint.
Germaine Greer
#12. Sex is more fun than cars but cars refuel quicker than men.
Germaine Greer
#13. There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men.
Germaine Greer
#14. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication.
Germaine Greer
#15. Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.
Germaine Greer
#16. It is agreed that little girls should have a different physical education than little boys, but it is not admitted how much of the difference is counseled by the conviction that little girls should not look like little boys.
Germaine Greer
#17. Human beings love, despite their compulsions to limit it and exploit it chaotically. Their love persuades them to make vows, build houses and turn their passion ultimately to duty.
Germaine Greer
#18. As soon as we find ourselves working at being indispensable, rigging up a pattern of vulnerability in our loved ones, we know that our love has taken the socially sanctioned form of egotism.
Germaine Greer
#19. Sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearte-ingly than ever before.
Germaine Greer
#20. Men are the enemy in much the same way that some crazed boy in uniform was the enemy of another like him in most respects except the uniform. One possible tactic is to try to get the uniforms off.
Germaine Greer
#21. I got him' is nonsense in terms of love relationships, and so is 'I lost him'. If we could stop thinking in terms of capture, we would not have to fear the loosening of the captives' bonds and our failing beauty, and he would not have ulcers about being outsrtipped or belittled.
Germaine Greer
#22. Nature herself is not always unambiguous. Sometimes a girl child may have so well-developed a clitoris that it is assumed she is a boy. Likewise, many male children may be underdeveloped, or their genitals deformed or hidden and it is assumed that they are girls.
Germaine Greer
#23. Men ought to become more conscious of their bodies as objects of delight.
Germaine Greer
#24. If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible.
Germaine Greer
#25. Womanpower means the self determination of women, and that means all the baggage of paternalistic society will have to be thrown overboard.
Germaine Greer
#26. I'm passionately opposed to the nuclear family, with its mom and dad and their 2.4 children. I think it's the most neurotic life-style ever developed.
Germaine Greer
#27. As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.
Germaine Greer
#28. Until women themselves reject stigma and refuse to feel shame for the way others treat them, they have no hope of achieving full human stature.
Germaine Greer
#29. Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.
Germaine Greer
#30. A housewife's work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not.
Germaine Greer
#31. 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.
Germaine Greer
#32. Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
Germaine Greer
#33. I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.
Germaine Greer
#34. The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all.
Germaine Greer
#35. The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.
Germaine Greer
#36. Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
Germaine Greer
#37. English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men.
Germaine Greer
#38. Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.
Germaine Greer
#39. Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.
Germaine Greer
#40. Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.
Germaine Greer
#41. Developing the muscles of the soul demands no competitive spirit, no killer instinct, although it may erect pain barriers that the spiritual athlete must crash through.
Germaine Greer
#42. At the same time as woman was becoming the showcase for wealth and caste, while men were slipping into relative anonymity and "handsome is as handsome does," she was emerging as the central emblem of western art.
Germaine Greer
#43. We can't change the moon but we can live in harmony with its tides, and we can make some ripples of our own.
Germaine Greer
#44. Only one thing is certain: if pot is legalized, it won't be for our benefit but for the authorities. To have it legalized will also be to lose control of it.
Germaine Greer
#45. Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage.
Germaine Greer
#46. Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned.
Germaine Greer
#47. The point of an organi family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves. They may accept the services that adults perform for them naturally without establishing dependencies.
Germaine Greer
#48. The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistadorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern.
Germaine Greer
#49. Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins.
Germaine Greer
#50. Pigs may like honey, but that doesn't stop it being sweet.
Germaine Greer
#51. Because love has been so perverted, it has in many cases come to involve a measure of hatred.
Germaine Greer
#52. Men have still not realized that letting women do so much of the work for so little reward makes a man in the house an expensive luxury rather than a necessity.
Germaine Greer
#53. There is no such thing as security. There never has been.
Germaine Greer
#54. 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.
Germaine Greer
#55. You're only young once, but you can be immature forever
Germaine Greer
#56. The second class status of marriage became one of the principal issues in the Reformation. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar, had barely posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg when he took himself a wife.
Germaine Greer
#57. The goal was 'every child a wanted child'; it should also have been 'every abortion a wanted abortion', but the two sides of the phony debate were never to meet.
Germaine Greer
#58. The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.
Germaine Greer
#59. If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.
Germaine Greer
#60. Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.
Germaine Greer
#61. 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.
Germaine Greer
#62. 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.
Germaine Greer
#63. 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.
Germaine Greer
#65. 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.
Germaine Greer
#66. Rescuing women from their burden of unwarranted guilt is going to require 'educational practices and socializing agents' even more effective than the ones that have been relentlessly loading female humans with responsibility for other people's behavior from their earliest childhood.
Germaine Greer
#67. 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.
Germaine Greer
#68. The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity, permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy.
Germaine Greer
#69. I find that those men who are personally most polite to women, who call them angels and all that, cherish in secret the greatest contempt for them.
Germaine Greer
#70. 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?
Germaine Greer
#71. If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby.
Germaine Greer
#72. We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'.
Germaine Greer
#73. Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.
Germaine Greer
#74. In modern consumer society, the attack on mother-child eroticism took its total form; breastfeeding was proscribed and the breasts reserved for the husband's fetishistic delectation. At the same time, babies were segregated, put into cold beds alone and not picked up if they cried.
Germaine Greer
#75. 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.
Germaine Greer
#76. The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy, and envy.
Germaine Greer
#78. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought or not.
Germaine Greer
#79. If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?
Germaine Greer
#80. Lies are vile things, with a horrible life of their own. They contaminate the truth that surrounds them.
Germaine Greer
#81. We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional.
Germaine Greer
#82. The drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology.
Germaine Greer
#83. Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.
Germaine Greer
#84. Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.
Germaine Greer
#86. If a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got?
Germaine Greer
#87. No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders.
Germaine Greer
#88. We still make love to organs and not people; that so far from realising that people are never more idiosyncratic, never more totally there when they make love, we re never more incommunicative, never more alone.
Germaine Greer
#89. The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly.
Germaine Greer
#90. Those miserable women who blame the men who let them down for their misery and isolation enact every day the initial mistake of sacrificing their personal responsibility for themselves.
Germaine Greer
#91. Society seems to find it irresistible to characterise the "unworldliness" of the male intellectual and academic in terms of his failure to control the women in his life.
Germaine Greer
#92. Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.
Germaine Greer
#93. Our life-style contains more Thanatos than Eros, for egotism, exploitation, deception, obsession and addiction have more place in us than eroticism, joy, generosity and spontaneity.
Germaine Greer
#94. A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
Germaine Greer
#95. Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics.
Germaine Greer
#96. Two-up is Australia's very own way of parting a fool and his money.
Germaine Greer
#97. When abandoned women follow their fleeing males with tear-stained faces, screaming you can't do this to me, they reveal that all that they have offered in the name of generosity and altruism has been part of an assumed transaction, in which they were entitled to a certain payoff.
Germaine Greer
#98. Women's liberation did not see the female's potential in terms of the male's actual; the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men.
Germaine Greer
#99. There have been women in the past far more daring than we would need to be now, who ventured all and gained a little, but survived after all.
Germaine Greer
#100. It strikes me as very strange that whereas Tennyson could support most of Mr. Buckley's propositions about free trade, and the private sector, and private enterprise, Tennyson found no difficulty also in lending intellectual support to the idea of Women's Liberation.
Germaine Greer
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