Germaine Greer - The Female Eunuch (1970)

66 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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