Germaine Greer Quotes

136 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Germaine Greer
Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life. There is no such thing as security. There never has been.

Germaine Greer
The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behaviour, 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
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
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
How you answer the question, whether individuals should be persuaded to live their whole lives in a state of chemical dependency, first upon contraceptive steroids and then on replacement therapy, depends upon your regard for the autonomy of the individual. If men would not live their lives this way, why should women?

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

Germaine Greer
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.

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

Germaine Greer
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
The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.

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

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

Germaine Greer
An enema under the influence of Ecstasy would probably feel much like this.

Germaine Greer
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
Men ought to be more conscious of their bodies as objects of delight, and women less so.

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

Germaine Greer
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.

Germaine Greer
You can now see the Female Eunuch the world over…spreading herself wherever blue jeans and Coca-Cola may go. Wherever you see nail varnish, lipstick, brassieres, and high heels, the Eunuch has set up her camp.

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

Germaine Greer
Mother is the dead heart of the family, spending the father's earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps and watches the television.

Germaine Greer
The climacteric marks the end of apologizing. The chrysalis of conditioning has once for all to break and the female woman finally to emerge.

Germaine Greer
Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they might be the normal ones and the heroes are insane.

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

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

Germaine Greer
The consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over.

Germaine Greer
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.

Germaine Greer