Germaine Greer Quotes

136 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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 most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.

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

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

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

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

Germaine Greer
Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband's often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says 'What would I do without you?' is already destroyed.

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

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

Germaine Greer
A woman's pleasure is not dependent upon the presence of a penis in the vagina; neither is a man's.

Germaine Greer
Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives — to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It's a process that sacrifices vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one that's got to be changed.

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

Germaine Greer
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. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.

Germaine Greer
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
The misery of the middle-aged woman is a grey 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.

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