Germaine Greer Quotes

136 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Germaine Greer
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.

Germaine Greer
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
English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave.

Germaine Greer
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
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
It is in our interests to let the police and their employers go on believing that the Underground is a conspiracy, because it increases their paranoia and their inability to deal with what is really happening. As long as they look for ringleaders and documents they will miss their mark, which is that proportion of every personality which belongs in the Underground.

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

Germaine Greer
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
The most popular image of the female despite the exigencies of the clothing trade is all boobs and buttocks, a hallucinating sequence of parabolae and bulges.

Germaine Greer
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
If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality?

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

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

Germaine Greer
Nobody who is asked the question, 'How old do you think I am?' ever answers the question honestly. The question that is answered is, 'How old do you think I think you think I am?'

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

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

Germaine Greer
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