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
Topics: Humanity
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
Topics: Children
Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Communication, Loneliness
Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.
—Germaine Greer
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
Topics: Energy
Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.
—Germaine Greer
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
Topics: Birth Control
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Birth
There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood what women want and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue. Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Women
The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Women
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Freedom
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
Topics: Libraries
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
There is no such thing as security. There never has been.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Security
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
Topics: Drugs
I didn’t fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Women, Feminism
It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent “celibacy,” by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity “backward.”
—Germaine Greer
Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Women
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
Topics: Women, Men & Women, Men
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
Topics: Marriage
The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Pleasure
The most threatened group in human societies as in animal societies is the unmated male: the unmated male is more likely to wind up in prison or in an asylum or dead than his mated counterpart. He is less likely to be promoted at work and he is considered a poor credit risk.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Men
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
Topics: Men
Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky ass, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. I’m sick of pretending that some fatuous male’s self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I’m sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Women
A garden is the best alternative therapy.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: One liners, Gardening
Woman cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appear something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Women, Appearance
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
Topics: Men & Women, Men, Women
Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Women
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
Topics: One liners, Revolution, Revolutions, Revolutionaries
Women’s liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let’s get on with it.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Feminism, Women
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
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- Katharine Whitehorn English Journalist
- Daniel J. Boorstin American Historian
- John Kotter American Management Consultant
- William Blackstone English Judge
- Randy Pausch American Computer Scientist
- William Graham Sumner American Polymath
- Claude Bernard French Physiologist
- S. I. Hayakawa Canadian-Born Academic
- Dero A. Saunders American Editor
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