Germaine Greer famous quotes

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
-- Germaine Greer

#Peace #Diversity #Culture

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

#Beautiful #Self Esteem #Achievement

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.
-- Germaine Greer

#Energy #Lost #Faculty

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.
-- Germaine Greer

#Dark #Lakes #Light

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

#Book #Reading #Thought Provoking

Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
-- Germaine Greer

#Husband #Live Life #Apology

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

#Home #Australia #News

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

#Women #Struggle #Joy

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.
-- Germaine Greer

#Humans #Self Discovery

I do think that women could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people’s ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy — when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some heirarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, yet I think it’s women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation.
-- Germaine Greer

#Thinking #Opposites #Ideas

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.
-- Germaine Greer

#Essence #Spontaneity #Pleasure

Act quickly, think slowly.
-- Germaine Greer

#Wisdom #Thinking

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

#Peace #Betrayal #Freedom

Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.
-- Germaine Greer

#Girl #Order #Land

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

#Hurt #Regret #Envy

A garden is the best alternative therapy.
-- Germaine Greer

#Garden #Alternatives #Therapy

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

#Important #Fertility #Management

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

#Hate #Women #Memorable

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

#Heart #Men #Humanity

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

#Love #Running #High Heels

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

#Design #Independence #Rewards

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

#Wisdom #Lonely #Loneliness

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

#Husband #Wife #House

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

#Men #Culture #Care

Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their 'inferiors'? They would need to shed their desperate need to admire a man, and accept the gentler role of loving him. A learned woman cannot castrate a truck-driver like she can her intellectual rival, because he has no exaggerated respect for her bookish capacities. The alternative to conventional education is not stupidity, and many a clever girl needs the corrective of a humbler soul's genuine wisdom.
-- Germaine Greer

#Girl #Clever #Men

I grew up thinking there was one unpardonable sin – to be boring.
-- Germaine Greer

#Thinking #Sin #Boring

Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother
-- Germaine Greer

#Mother #Exorcism #Gender

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

#Art #Men #Doe

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

#Men #Shipping #Internet

Every wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband's favourite meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only friend, to encourage him to rejectthe consensus of opinionand find reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops of steel that will strangle them both.
-- Germaine Greer

#Husband #Pride #Reality

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

#Running #Animal #Compassion

Nature herself is not always unambiguous. Sometimes a girl child may have so well-developed a ***** 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

#Girl #Nature #Children

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

#Needs #Revolution #Disappear

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

#Sex #Sorry #Stress

Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.
-- Germaine Greer

#Weight #Body #Efficiency

So far it has been assumed that the only pregnancies which are aborted are accidental ones and the only foetuses destroyed those whose mothers could not bear the thought of their becoming children. In a just world this would be the case, but the world is far from just. Too many women are forced to abort by poverty, by their menfolk, by their parents. Poverty has many faces; it may be the poverty of the young, the unmarried, the student, the unemployed, the female or a combination of these.
-- Germaine Greer

#Mother #Children #Pregnancy

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

#Love #Hatred #Cases

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

#Curves #Human Body

The drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology.
-- Germaine Greer

#Love #Drug #Sexuality

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

#Divorce #Interesting #Lovers

Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves-to breakour own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today."Stewart B. Johnson"Men rule because women let them. Male misogyny is real enough, and it has dreadful consequences, but female misogyny is what keeps women out of power.
-- Germaine Greer

#Inspiring #Real #Men

I think that testosterone is a rare poison.
-- Germaine Greer

#Thinking #Poison #Testosterone

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

#Cooking #Frightened

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

#Australia #Gambling #Two

Marriage made more sense when it was indissoluble. It's the woman trying to cope with the strains of a one-parent family who will suffer most from the relaxation of the divorce laws.
-- Germaine Greer

#Divorce #Law #Parent

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

#Men #Facts #Disgusted

Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present. He that has no children brings them up well
-- Germaine Greer

#Children #War #Love You

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

#World #Slavery #Abandonment

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

#Mother #Baby #Children

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

#Women #Female #Buttocks

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

#Family #Mother #Father

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.
-- Germaine Greer

#Men #Shoes #Height

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

#Sex #Men #Energy

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

#Work #Play #Favors

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

#Children #Real #Occupation

A woman is never so happy as when she is being wooed. Then she is mistress of all she surveys, the cynosure of all eyes, until that day of days when she sails down the aisle, a vision in white, lovely as the stefanotis she carries, borne translucent on her father's manly arm to be handed over to her new father-surrogate. If she is clever, and if her husband has the time and the resources, she will insist on being wooed all her life; more likely she will discover that marriage is not romantic, that husbands forget birthdays and aniversaries and seldom pay compliments, are often perfunctory.
-- Germaine Greer

#Marriage #Clever #Husband

The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent marriage. Otherwise it is a kiss that lies. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called 'Sweethearts,' 'Romantic Secrets' and so forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities.
-- Germaine Greer

#Lying #Heart #Kissing

Lifelong monogamy is a maniacal idea.
-- Germaine Greer

#Ideas #Monogamy #Lifelong

continuing sexual interest and perfect sexual adjustment between partners who have been together for thirty years is so difficult and rare that no one should feel guilty or inadequate for not having managed it.
-- Germaine Greer

#Sex #Years #Perfect

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

#Communication #Community #Age

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

#Sweet #Pigs #May

Awareness of time as flying has some advantages; it precludes boredom, for one thing. It matters little that younger people find older people boring or slow. Older people have a right to resist being rushed, to stand and stare at the fragile world that has become so unspeakably dear to them. For the lucky ones, who will not have to leave while they are still in love with life, there will come a later time when that passion too will fade, but while one is still possessed by that great tenderness, it must be yielded to.
-- Germaine Greer

#Passion #Love Life #People

I believe in permanent revolution.
-- Germaine Greer

#Believe #Revolution #I Believe

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.
-- Germaine Greer

#Mom #Children #Dad

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

#Real #Love Is #Self

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

#Hazards #Bunnies #Muscles

It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance.
-- Germaine Greer

#Self #Evil #Our Society

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

#Art #Reality #Poetry

Despite a lifetime of service to the cause of sexual liberation, I have never caught venereal disease, which makes me feel rather like an Arctic explorer who has never had frostbite.
-- Germaine Greer

#Disease #Causes #Lifetime

The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity.
-- Germaine Greer

#Struggle #Joy #Achievement

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

#Men #Delight #Body

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

#War #Grief #Government

The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behavior, 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

#People #World #May

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

#Believe #Long #Personality

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

#Women #Home #Needs

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

#Home #Library #World

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well.
-- Germaine Greer

#Strong #Communication #Community

If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed.
-- Germaine Greer

#Adoption #Roles #Lost

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

#Children #Adults #Lessons

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

#Children #Exercise #Morality

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

#Thinking #Toilets #Bladder

The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, "Why are there no great women artists?" it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.
-- Germaine Greer

#Art #Horse #Men

Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.
-- Germaine Greer

#Spring #Artist #Creating

Consensus politics means that you cannot afford to give the many-headed beast, the public, anything to vote against, for voting against is what gargantuan pseudodemocracy has to come down to.
-- Germaine Greer

#Mean #Giving #Voting

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

#Confusion #People #Circumstances

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

#Men #Privilege #Enjoy

We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional.
-- Germaine Greer

#Zoos #Thinking #Animal

The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of--career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle.
-- Germaine Greer

#Hippie #Ambition #Lifestyle

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 ***** power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics.
-- Germaine Greer

# #Tactics #World