Germaine Greer quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Germaine Greer on Wise Famous Quotes.

War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests.

Kinkiness comes from low energy. It's the substitution of lechery for lust.

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.

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

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

I think that testosterone is a rare poison.

As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.

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

The patterns of gratification are simple, and seem to fall into two patterns, the Great Bitch and the Poison Maiden.

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

Womanpower means the self determination of women, and that means all the baggage of paternalistic society will have to be thrown overboard.

Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home.

We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication.

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

My knees have always been ugly.

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.

Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.

The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by obligatory smiles.

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

Common morality now treats childbearing as an aberration. There are practically no good reasons left for exercising one's fertility.

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.

We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'.

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.

Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother

Sex is more fun than cars but cars refuel quicker than men.

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

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

Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.

Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.

Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.

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

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

The most highly prized curve of all is that of the bosom ...

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.

Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.

Lifelong monogamy is a maniacal idea.

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Next time round Hitler will be a machine.

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.

If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible.

No sex is better than bad sex.

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.

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.

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

No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders.

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

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

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

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

Because love has been so perverted, it has in many cases come to involve a measure of hatred.

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

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.

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.

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

Sexual religion is the opiate of the supermenial.

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

Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought or not.

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.

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

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

People who are really happy do not concern themselves with convincing others of the fact.

Lies are vile things, with a horrible life of their own. They contaminate the truth that surrounds them.

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

Security is the denial of life

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

We can't change the moon but we can live in harmony with its tides, and we can make some ripples of our own.

Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man.

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

Two-up is Australia's very own way of parting a fool and his money.

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

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

The drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology.

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.

If a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got?

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

Men ought to become more conscious of their bodies as objects of delight.

I believe in permanent revolution.

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

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?

Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.

A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman's neck.

The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.

The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all.

Pigs may like honey, but that doesn't stop it being sweet.

Soccer is an art more central to our culture than anything the Arts Council deigns to recognize.

In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.

A garden is the best alternative therapy.