Germaine Greer Quotes

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

Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.

- 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.

- Germaine Greer

It strikes me as very strange that whereas Tennyson could support most of Mr. Buckley's propositions about free trade, and the private sector, and private enterprise, Tennyson found no difficulty also in lending intellectual support to the idea of Women's Liberation.

- Germaine Greer

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

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

I have always been principally interested in men for sex. I've always thought any sane woman would be a lover of women because loving men is such a mess. I have always wished I'd fall in love with a woman. Damn.

- Germaine Greer

Rescuing women from their burden of unwarranted guilt is going to require 'educational practices and socializing agents' even more effective than the ones that have been relentlessly loading female humans with responsibility for other people's behavior from their earliest childhood.

- Germaine Greer

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

- Germaine Greer

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

- Germaine Greer

The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.

- Germaine Greer

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

- Germaine Greer

Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.

- Germaine Greer

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

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

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

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

- Germaine Greer

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

- 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

Until women themselves reject stigma and refuse to feel shame for the way others treat them, they have no hope of achieving full human stature.

- Germaine Greer

Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.

- Germaine Greer

It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.

- Germaine Greer

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

- Germaine Greer

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

- Germaine Greer

Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage.

- Germaine Greer

Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

- Germaine Greer

What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.

- Germaine Greer

If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

- Germaine Greer

All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.

- Germaine Greer

The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.

- Germaine Greer

Developing the muscles of the soul demands no competitive spirit, no killer instinct, although it may erect pain barriers that the spiritual athlete must crash through.

- 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

Act quickly, think slowly.

- Germaine Greer

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

- Germaine Greer

The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.

- Germaine Greer

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

Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.

- Germaine Greer

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

- Germaine Greer

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

- Germaine Greer

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

Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.

- Germaine Greer

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

- Germaine Greer

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.

- Germaine Greer

You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.

- Germaine Greer

I think that testosterone is a rare poison.

- Germaine Greer

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

- Germaine Greer

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

- Germaine Greer

One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.

- Germaine Greer

Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life.

- Germaine Greer

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

- Germaine Greer

There is no such thing as security. There never has been.

- Germaine Greer