Top 150 Germaine Greer Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Act quickly, think slowly.”

— Germaine Greer

2. “Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.”

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

5. “The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity.”

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

7. “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

8. “There is no such thing as security. There never has been.”

— Germaine Greer

9. “Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother.”

— Germaine Greer

10. “Security is the denial of life.”

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

12. “A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.”

— Germaine Greer

Featured in: Reading Quotes

13. “The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity, permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy.”

— Germaine Greer

14. “Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.”

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

16. “Our life-style contains more Thanatos than Eros, for egotism, exploitation, deception, obsession and addiction have more place in us than eroticism, joy, generosity and spontaneity.”

— Germaine Greer

17. “We can’t change the moon but we can live in harmony with its tides, and we can make some ripples of our own.”

— Germaine Greer

18. “The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.”

— Germaine Greer

19. “Mother is the dead heart of the family spending father’s earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps, and watches the television.”

— Germaine Greer

20. “When I was a young hippy, I thought marching naked would be a strong protest, but I don’t think it would be as effective now.”

— Germaine Greer

Featured in: Strong Quotes

21. “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

22. “Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.”

— Germaine Greer

23. “A garden is the best alternative therapy.”

— Germaine Greer

24. “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

25. “People who are really happy do not concern themselves with convincing others of the fact.”

— Germaine Greer

26. “I think that testosterone is a rare poison.”

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

28. “Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.”

— Germaine Greer

29. “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

30. “If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go, baby.”

— Germaine Greer

31. “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

32. “Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.”

— Germaine Greer

33. “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

34. “I believe in permanent revolution.”

— Germaine Greer

35. “We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional.”

— Germaine Greer

36. “If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?”

— Germaine Greer

37. “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

38. “The high-heeled shoe is a marvellously contradictory item; it brings a woman to a man’s height but makes sure she cannot keep up with him.”

— Germaine Greer

39. “A garden is a kinetic work of art, not an object but a process, open-ended, biodegradable, nurturant, like all women’s artistry. A garden is the best alternative therapy.”

— Germaine Greer

40. “Womanpower means the self determination of women, and that means all the baggage of paternalistic society will have to be thrown overboard.”

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

42. “Soccer is an art more central to our culture than anything the Arts Council deigns to recognize.”

— Germaine Greer

43. “Love, love, love – all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures.”

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

46. “I’m passionately opposed to the nuclear family, with its mom and dad and their 2.4 children. I think it’s the most neurotic life-style ever developed.”

— Germaine Greer

47. “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

48. “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

49. “The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistadorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern.”

— Germaine Greer

50. “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