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
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
Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Women
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
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
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: Women, Feminism
All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defense. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Mothers
The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy, and envy.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Regret, Choices
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
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: Men, Men & Women, Women
Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.
—Germaine Greer
There is no such thing as security. There never has been.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Security
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Birth
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: Women, Men, Men & Women
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
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
Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Loneliness, Communication
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Freedom
The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray 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
Topics: Age
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
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Family
The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Pleasure
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
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
The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Men
Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.
—Germaine Greer
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
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
I didn’t fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.
—Germaine Greer
Topics: Feminism, 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: Revolutions, Revolutionaries, Revolution, One liners
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Lincoln Steffens American Journalist
- 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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