Germaine Greer Quotations

Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage.

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

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

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.

Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves-to breakour own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today."Stewart B. Johnson"Men rule because women let them. Male misogyny is real enough, and it has dreadful consequences, but female misogyny is what keeps women out of power.

You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.

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

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.

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?

Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life.

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

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.

The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.

English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men.

I think that testosterone is a rare poison.

Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.

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

The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I think these things are so political you can't trust them at all. It's madness that I am on the list. It's absurd and completely unjustifiable. Their problem was they had to put an Australian on it. These lists are always so right-wing. It's like the Nobel prize, it is always 'people we can do business with'.

Our whole lives are lived in a tangle of telling, not telling, misleading, allowing to know, concealing, eavesdropping and collusion. When Washington said he could not tell a lie, his father must have answered, 'You had better learn.

Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother

Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.

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?

The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.

. Probably the biggest omission though is the Beatles tour 1964! Undoubtedly there are many more....

After thirty years of feminism there is vastly more pornography disseminated more widely than ever before.

If she'd been a man, I would have kicked her in the ....

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.

It's also an oxymoron because what we see is not real,

It was as if we were playing Manhunt. It was a kind of lethal darts match.

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.

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.

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.

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

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.

There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men.

I do think that women could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people’s ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy — when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some heirarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, yet I think it’s women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation.

The drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology.

After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is.

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.

Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter.

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.

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

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 civilisation and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.

Act quickly, think slowly.

The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy, and envy.

A garden is the best alternative therapy.

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

continuing sexual interest and perfect sexual adjustment between partners who have been together for thirty years is so difficult and rare that no one should feel guilty or inadequate for not having managed it.

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.

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well.

Every wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband's favourite meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only friend, to encourage him to rejectthe consensus of opinionand find reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops of steel that will strangle them both.

Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their 'inferiors'? They would need to shed their desperate need to admire a man, and accept the gentler role of loving him. A learned woman cannot castrate a truck-driver like she can her intellectual rival, because he has no exaggerated respect for her bookish capacities. The alternative to conventional education is not stupidity, and many a clever girl needs the corrective of a humbler soul's genuine wisdom.

Bollocks have never frightened me. I'll eat a bollock any time.

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.

The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.

So far it has been assumed that the only pregnancies which are aborted are accidental ones and the only foetuses destroyed those whose mothers could not bear the thought of their becoming children. In a just world this would be the case, but the world is far from just. Too many women are forced to abort by poverty, by their menfolk, by their parents. Poverty has many faces; it may be the poverty of the young, the unmarried, the student, the unemployed, the female or a combination of these.

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.

I grew up thinking there was one unpardonable sin – to be boring.

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.

Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.

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.