Germaine Greer Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

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

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

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

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

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

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.

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

Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Act quickly, think slowly.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I think that testosterone is a rare poison.