Top 150 Germaine Greer Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “In modern consumer society, the attack on mother-child eroticism took its total form; breastfeeding was proscribed and the breasts reserved for the husband’s fetishistic delectation. At the same time, babies were segregated, put into cold beds alone and not picked up if they cried.”

— Germaine Greer

103. “Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins.”

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

105. “It is agreed that little girls should have a different physical education than little boys, but it is not admitted how much of the difference is counseled by the conviction that little girls should not look like little boys.”

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

107. “There have been women in the past far more daring than we would need to be now, who ventured all and gained a little, but survived after all.”

— Germaine Greer

108. “As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.”

— Germaine Greer

109. “If women could regard childbearing not as a duty or an inescapable destiny but as a privilege to be worked for, the ay a man might work for the right to have a family, children might grow up without the burden of gratitude for the gift of life which they never asked for.”

— Germaine Greer

110. “If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible.”

— Germaine Greer

111. “Because love has been so perverted, it has in many cases come to involve a measure of hatred.”

— Germaine Greer

112. “After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is.”

— Germaine Greer

113. “There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men.”

— Germaine Greer

114. “I find that those men who are personally most polite to women, who call them angels and all that, cherish in secret the greatest contempt for them.”

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

116. “Next time round Hitler will be a machine.”

— Germaine Greer

117. “The drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology.”

— Germaine Greer

118. “Consensus politics means that you cannot afford to give the many-headed beast, the public, anything to vote against, for voting against is what gargantuan pseudodemocracy has to come down to.”

— Germaine Greer

119. “Unless the concepts of work and play and reward for work change absolutely, women must continue to provide cheap labor, and even more, free labor exacted of right by an employer possessed of a contract for life, made out in his favor.”

— Germaine Greer

120. “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.”

— Germaine Greer

121. “In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.”

— Germaine Greer

122. “Gillard is as likeable as Rudd is charmless. She is self-deprecating; he is ludicrously vainglorious. She is a mistress of understatement; he is a ranter.”

— Germaine Greer

123. “No one goes to the toilet in novels. You’d think none of us had bladders.”

— Germaine Greer

124. “Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.”

— Germaine Greer

125. “Despite a lifetime of service to the cause of sexual liberation, I have never caught venereal disease, which makes me feel rather like an Arctic explorer who has never had frostbite.”

— Germaine Greer

126. “Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they might be the normal ones and the heroes are insane.”

— Germaine Greer

127. “Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.”

— Germaine Greer

128. “The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all.”

— Germaine Greer

129. “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

130. “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 and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient arabesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art nouveau, they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female.”

— Germaine Greer

131. “The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.”

— Germaine Greer

132. “The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly.”

— Germaine Greer

133. “Thirty years on, femininity is still compulsory for women – and has become an option for men – while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile, the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character.”

— Germaine Greer

134. “Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.”

— Germaine Greer

135. “If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.”

— Germaine Greer

136. “I got him’ is nonsense in terms of love relationships, and so is ‘I lost him’. If we could stop thinking in terms of capture, we would not have to fear the loosening of the captives’ bonds and our failing beauty, and he would not have ulcers about being outsrtipped or belittled.”

— Germaine Greer

137. “We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication.”

— Germaine Greer

138. “Common morality now treats childbearing as an aberration. There are practically no good reasons left for exercising one’s fertility.”

— Germaine Greer

139. “Rescuing women from their burden of unwarranted guilt is going to require ‘educational practices and socializing agents’ even more effective than the ones that have been relentlessly loading female humans with responsibility for other people’s behavior from their earliest childhood.”

— Germaine Greer

140. “Once a paper admits any principle of censorship for survival, the we-don’t-want-to-do-it-but-we-don’t-want-to-lose-the-printer kind of censorship, it jeopardizes the integrity of its editorial principle. It’s better to print and be damned, because you’ll be damned anyway.”

— Germaine Greer

141. “At the same time as woman was becoming the showcase for wealth and caste, while men were slipping into relative anonymity and “handsome is as handsome does,” she was emerging as the central emblem of western art.”

— Germaine Greer

142. “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

143. “Lies are vile things, with a horrible life of their own. They contaminate the truth that surrounds them.”

— Germaine Greer

144. “The most popular image of the female despite the exigencies of the clothing trade is all boobs and buttocks, a hallucinating sequence of parabolae and bulges.”

— Germaine Greer

145. “The most highly prized curve of all is that of the bosom...”

— Germaine Greer

146. “Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband’s fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. The possibility that a wife might have been closer to their idol than they could ever be, understood him better than they ever could, could not be entertained.”

— Germaine Greer

147. “Women’s work, married or unmarried, is menial and low paid. Women’s right to possess property is curtailed, more if they are married. How can marriage provide security? In any case a husband is a possession which can be lost or stolen and the abandoned wife of thirty odd with a couple of children is far more desolate and insecure in her responsibility than an unmarried woman with or without children ever could be.”

— Germaine Greer

148. “As soon as we find ourselves working at being indispensable, rigging up a pattern of vulnerability in our loved ones, we know that our love has taken the socially sanctioned form of egotism.”

— Germaine Greer

149. “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

150. “Supergroupies don’t have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage.”

— Germaine Greer