Top 100 Germaine Quotes
#1. The working-class aspirations are worse now than when I was a kid - and it was pretty bad when I was a kid. Reality TV means they are being told they are no longer a working class, they're an underclass. Young lassies want to be Jordan or Jade, but very few aspire to be the next Germaine Greer.
Peter Mullan
#2. I don't belong to any clubs, and I dislike club mentality of any kind, even feminism - although I do relate to the purpose and point of feminism. More in the work of older feminists, really, like Germaine Greer.
Jane Campion
#3. And again that big, bushy thing of hers worked its bloom and magic. It began to have an independent existence for me too. There was Germaine and there was that rose bush of hers.. I liked them separately and I liked them together.
Henry Miller
#4. Although some people call me anti-feminist, I know I wasn't because Germaine Greer supported me.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#6. As Germaine Greer puts it in The Whole Woman, to become a mother without wanting it is to live like a slave, or domestic animal.
Caitlin Moran
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Deny a young boy the right to have a toy gun and you will suppress his destructive urges, and he will turn out to be a homosexual - or worse!
Germaine Greer
#10. Kinkiness comes from low energy. It's the substitution of lechery for lust.
Germaine Greer
#11. One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
Germaine Greer
#12. Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.
Germaine Greer
#14. The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.
Germaine Greer
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.
Germaine Greer
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. We may love imperfectly, we may love blindly, but love we must.
WARS OF THE FLESH
Germaine Shames
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Too many women are forced to abort by poverty, by their menfolk, by their parents ... A choice is only possible if there are genuine alternatives.
Germaine Greer
#26. Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.
Germaine Greer
#27. A wellborn soul is guided by only one principle in the world: always do good to others and never harm
Germaine De Stael
#28. Unless the concepts of work and play and reward for work change absolutely, women must continue to provide cheap labor, and even more, free labor exacted of right by an employer possessed of a contract for life, made out in his favor.
Germaine Greer
#29. 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
#30. Sex is more fun than cars but cars refuel quicker than men.
Germaine Greer
#31. There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men.
Germaine Greer
#32. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication.
Germaine Greer
#33. The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
Germaine Greer
#34. Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.
Germaine Greer
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. When I was a young hippy, I thought marching naked would be a strong protest, but I don't think it would be as effective now.
Germaine Greer
#38. Morality and freedom are as certainly the only bases of the happiness and dignity of the human race as the system of Galileo is the true theory of the celestial motions.
Germaine De Stael
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Germaine Greer
#42. 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
#43. 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.
Germaine Greer
#44. 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
#46. Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.
Germaine Greer
#47. Most people spend their whole lives waging war - against people they don't even know. And against themselves, whom they know least of all.
from BETWEEN TWO DESERTS
Germaine Shames
#48. Marriage made more sense when it was indissoluble. It's the woman trying to cope with the strains of a one-parent family who will suffer most from the relaxation of the divorce laws.
Germaine Greer
#49. 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
#50. Men ought to become more conscious of their bodies as objects of delight.
Germaine Greer
#52. Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
Germaine Greer
#53. In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death.
Germaine Greer
#54. The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.
Germaine Greer
#55. The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.
Germaine Greer
#56. Consensus politics means that you cannot afford to give the many-headed beast, the public, anything to vote against, for voting against is what gargantuan pseudodemocracy has to come down to.
Germaine Greer
#57. It is not just saying prayers that gets results, but it is spending time with the Father, learning His wisdom, drawing on His strength, being filled with His quietness, and basking in His love that bring results to our prayers. Praise the Lord!
Germaine Copeland
#58. If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible.
Germaine Greer
#59. Womanpower means the self determination of women, and that means all the baggage of paternalistic society will have to be thrown overboard.
Germaine Greer
#60. 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
#61. As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.
Germaine Greer
#62. Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.
Germaine Greer
#63. The house wife is an unpaid employee in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee.
Germaine Greer
#64. On ladies' nights they watch frozen-faced while their men embrace and fool about commenting to each other that they are all overgrown boys. Of the love of fellows they know nothing. They cannot love each other in this easy, innocent, spontaneous way because they cannot love themselves.
Germaine Greer
#65. Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.
Germaine Greer
#66. 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
#67. Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.
Germaine Greer
#68. The most highly prized curve of all is that of the bosom ...
Germaine Greer
#69. 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
#70. It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.
Germaine Greer
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Soccer is an art more central to our culture than anything the Arts Council deigns to recognize.
Germaine Greer
#74. Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.
Germaine Greer
#75. Common morality now treats childbearing as an aberration. There are practically no good reasons left for exercising one's fertility.
Germaine Greer
#76. Everybody who meddles with Shakespeare biography readily accepts that the Bard was unfaithful to his wife and excuses him for it, but infidelity on the part of his wife is sufficient to justify estrangement.
Germaine Greer
#77. I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.
Germaine Greer
#79. The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all.
Germaine Greer
#81. Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.
Germaine Greer
#82. It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along.
Germaine Greer
#83. The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.
Germaine Greer
#84. Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
Germaine Greer
#85. The high-heeled shoe is a marvellously contradictory item; it brings a woman to a man's height but makes sure she cannot keep up with him.
Germaine Greer
#86. English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men.
Germaine Greer
#87. Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.
Germaine Greer
#88. God (mentally on my knees), if I can just get through this night, I'll come to church. On Christmas. Every fifteen years. For the next fifteen years. So once.
K.F. Germaine
#89. The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by obligatory smiles.
Germaine Greer
#90. Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.
Germaine Greer
#91. Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.
Germaine Greer
#92. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage.
Germaine Greer
#99. 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
#100. 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
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