Top 150 Germaine Greer Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Germaine Greer

53. “Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home.”

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

55. “The few men who do a hand’s turn around the house expect gratitude and recognition, so sure are they that, though it is their dirt, it is not their job.”

— Germaine Greer

56. “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

57. “A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman’s neck.”

— Germaine Greer

58. “Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband’s newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.”

— Germaine Greer

59. “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

60. “The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by obligatory smiles.”

— Germaine Greer

61. “Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women’s bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.”

— Germaine Greer

62. “The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.”

— Germaine Greer

63. “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

64. “The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy, and envy.”

— Germaine Greer

65. “Status ought not to be measured by a woman’s ability to attract and snare a man.”

— Germaine Greer

66. “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

67. “Men ought to become more conscious of their bodies as objects of delight.”

— Germaine Greer

68. “Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter.”

— Germaine Greer

69. “Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.”

— Germaine Greer

70. “In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death.”

— Germaine Greer

71. “War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests.”

— Germaine Greer

72. “Nature herself is not always unambiguous. Sometimes a girl child may have so well-developed a clitoris that it is assumed she is a boy. Likewise, many male children may be underdeveloped, or their genitals deformed or hidden and it is assumed that they are girls.”

— Germaine Greer

73. “My knees have always been ugly.”

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

76. “Kinkiness comes from low energy. It’s the substitution of lechery for lust.”

— Germaine Greer

77. “Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.”

— Germaine Greer

78. “If a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got?”

— Germaine Greer

79. “We still make love to organs and not people; that so far from realising that people are never more idiosyncratic, never more totally there when they make love, we re never more incommunicative, never more alone.”

— Germaine Greer

80. “Men have still not realized that letting women do so much of the work for so little reward makes a man in the house an expensive luxury rather than a necessity.”

— Germaine Greer

81. “Until women themselves reject stigma and refuse to feel shame for the way others treat them, they have no hope of achieving full human stature.”

— Germaine Greer

82. “Lifelong monogamy is a maniacal idea.”

— Germaine Greer

83. “Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.”

— Germaine Greer

84. “Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.”

— Germaine Greer

85. “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.”

— Germaine Greer

86. “Bollocks have never frightened me. I’ll eat a bollock any time.”

— Germaine Greer

87. “English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave.”

— Germaine Greer

88. “In ‘The Female Eunuch’ I argued that motherhood should not be treated as a substitute career; now I would argue that motherhood should be regarded as a genuine career option, that is to say, as paid work and, as such, as an alternative to other paid work. What this would mean is that every woman who decides to have a child would be paid enough to raise that child in decent circumstances.”

— Germaine Greer

89. “It’s absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book ‘An American Dream’ is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don’t catch him in a defensive position, he’ll admit it. I’d really like to help that man.”

— Germaine Greer

90. “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

91. “Pigs may like honey, but that doesn’t stop it being sweet.”

— Germaine Greer

92. “Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought or not.”

— Germaine Greer

93. “Women’s liberation did not see the female’s potential in terms of the male’s actual; the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men.”

— Germaine Greer

94. “If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed.”

— Germaine Greer

95. “I grew up thinking there was one unpardonable sin – to be boring.”

— Germaine Greer

96. “Sexual religion is the opiate of the supermenial.”

— Germaine Greer

97. “Two-up is Australia’s very own way of parting a fool and his money.”

— Germaine Greer

98. “Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.”

— Germaine Greer

99. “It strikes me as very strange that whereas Tennyson could support most of Mr. Buckley’s propositions about free trade, and the private sector, and private enterprise, Tennyson found no difficulty also in lending intellectual support to the idea of Women’s Liberation.”

— Germaine Greer

100. “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