Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Germaine Greer (Australia Academic)

Germaine Greer (b.1939) is an Australian-born writer, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century. She lives in the United Kingdom, where she has held academic positions, specializing in English literature, at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Germaine Greer

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

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

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’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

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

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

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: Appearance, 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, One liners, Revolutionaries, Revolution

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

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

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
Topics: Twentieth Century

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

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
Topics: Security

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

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

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

A garden is the best alternative therapy.
Germaine Greer
Topics: Gardening, One liners

The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
Germaine Greer
Topics: Birth

Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it’s one of the most charming things about them.
Germaine Greer
Topics: Evolution

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

Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.
Germaine Greer
Topics: Men & Women, Men, Women

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

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
Topics: Love

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

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

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
Topics: Disasters, Tragedy

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

A woman might claim to retain some of the child’s faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.
Germaine Greer
Topics: Women

The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.
Germaine Greer
Topics: Women

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