Germaine Greer Quotes & Sayings

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

People who are really happy do not concern themselves with convincing others of the fact. — Germaine Greer

A housewife's work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not. — Germaine Greer

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

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

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

The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all woman. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. — Germaine Greer

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

Bollocks have never frightened me. I'll eat a bollock any time. — Germaine Greer

The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent marriage. Otherwise it is a kiss that lies. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called 'Sweethearts,' 'Romantic Secrets' and so forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities. — Germaine Greer

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

Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought or not. — Germaine Greer

The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked. — Germaine Greer

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

You're only young once, but you can be immature forever — Germaine Greer

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

The consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over. Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it. — Germaine Greer

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

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity. — Germaine Greer

The most cursory examination of even the most progressive organs of information reveals a curious inability to recognize women as newsmakers, unless they are young or married to a head of state or naked or pregnant by some triumph of technology or perpetrators or victims of some hideous crime or any combiniation of the above. Women's issues are often disguised as people issues, unless they are relegated to the women's pages which amazingly still suvive. Senior figures are all male; even the few women who are deemed worthy of obituaries are shown in images from their youth, as if the last fourty years of their lives have been without achievement of any kind. If you analyse the by-lines in your morning paper, you will see that the senior editorial staff are all older men, supported by a rabble of junior females, the infinitely replacesable 'hackettes'. — Germaine Greer

As far as cosmetics are used for adornment in a conscious and creative way, they are not emblems of inauthenticity: it is when they are presented as the real thing, covering unsightly blemishes, disguising a repulsive thing so that it is acceptable to the world that their function is deeply suspect. The women who dare not go out without their false eyelashes are in serious psychic trouble. — Germaine Greer

The Poison Maiden has conceived by him, and is plumb ready to enter the divine category of mother, only one last fiend clubs her to death. The final clinch of male romanticism is that each man kills the thing he loves; whether she be Catharine in A Farewell to Arms, or the Grecian Urn, the 'tension that she be perfect' means that she must die, leavinf the hero's status as a great lover unchallenged. The pattern is still commonplace: the hero cannot marry. The sexual exploit must be conquest, not cohabitation and mutual tolerance. — Germaine Greer

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed. — Germaine Greer

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

It is agreed that 'girls take more bringing up' than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue. — Germaine Greer

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution. — Germaine Greer

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

I do think that women could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people's ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy - when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some heirarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, yet I think it's women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation. — Germaine Greer

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

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

Soccer is an art more central to our culture than anything the Arts Council deigns to recognize. — Germaine Greer

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

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

The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by obligatory smiles. — Germaine Greer

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

The Great Bitch is the deadly female, a worthy opponent for the omnipotent hero to exercise his powers upon and through. She is desirous, greedy, clever, dishonest, and two jumps ahead all the time. The hero may either have her on his side and like a lion-tamer sool her on to his enemies, or he may have to battle for his life at her hands. — Germaine Greer

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

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

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

So far it has been assumed that the only pregnancies which are aborted are accidental ones and the only foetuses destroyed those whose mothers could not bear the thought of their becoming children. In a just world this would be the case, but the world is far from just. Too many women are forced to abort by poverty, by their menfolk, by their parents. Poverty has many faces; it may be the poverty of the young, the unmarried, the student, the unemployed, the female or a combination of these. — Germaine Greer

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

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

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

Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage. — Germaine Greer

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

The crowning insult [of abortion] is that this ordeal is represented to her as some kind of a privilege.Her sad and onerous duty is garbed in the rhetoric of a civil right. — Germaine Greer

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

If a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? — Germaine Greer

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

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

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 defence. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health. — Germaine Greer

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

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

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

Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression. — Germaine Greer

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

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

When abandoned women follow their fleeing males with tear-stained faces, screaming you can't do this to me, they reveal that all that they have offered in the name of generosity and altruism has been part of an assumed transaction, in which they were entitled to a certain payoff. — Germaine Greer

The most highly prized curve of all is that of the bosom ... — Germaine Greer

It is commonplace observation that women are forever trying to straighten their hair if it is curly and curl it if it is straight, bind their breasts if they are large and pad them if they are small, darken their hair if it is light and lighten it if it is dark. Not all these measures are dictated by the fantom of fashion. They all reflect dissatisfaction with the body as it is, and an insistent desire that it be otherwise, not natural but controlled, fabricated. Many of the devices adopted by women are not cosmetic or ornamental, but disguise of the actual, arising from fear and distaste. — Germaine Greer

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

Awareness of time as flying has some advantages; it precludes boredom, for one thing. It matters little that younger people find older people boring or slow. Older people have a right to resist being rushed, to stand and stare at the fragile world that has become so unspeakably dear to them. For the lucky ones, who will not have to leave while they are still in love with life, there will come a later time when that passion too will fade, but while one is still possessed by that great tenderness, it must be yielded to. — Germaine Greer

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

Human beings are better equipped to cope with disaster and hardship than they are with unvarying security, but as long as security is the highest value in a community they can have little opportunity to decide this for themselves. It is agreed that Englishmen coped magnificently with a war, and were more cheerful, enterprising and friendly under the daily threat of bombardment than they are now under benevolent peacetime, when we are so far from worrying about how many people starve in Africa that we can tolerate British policy in Nigeria. — Germaine Greer

Lies are vile things, with a horrible life of their own. They contaminate the truth that surrounds them. — Germaine Greer

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

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

The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity. — Germaine Greer

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

Human beings love, despite their compulsions to limit it and exploit it chaotically. Their love persuades them to make vows, build houses and turn their passion ultimately to duty. — Germaine Greer

No sex is better than bad sex. — Germaine Greer

Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics. — Germaine Greer

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

After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is. — Germaine Greer

Lifelong monogamy is a maniacal idea. — Germaine Greer

Kinkiness comes from low energy. It's the substitution of lechery for lust. — Germaine Greer

The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all. — Germaine Greer

On ladies' nights they watch frozen-faced while their men embrace and fool about commenting to each other that they are all overgrown boys. Of the love of fellows they know nothing. They cannot love each other in this easy, innocent, spontaneous way because they cannot love themselves. — Germaine Greer

Common morality now treats childbearing as an aberration. There are practically no good reasons left for exercising one's fertility. — Germaine Greer

No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders. — Germaine Greer

Women who were housewives, who were pretty miserable ... felt inspired by her book and their life changed. They didn't become megastars, but they became a librarian or something. I've heard women say again and again when the subject of Germaine comes up: 'Well, her book changed my life for the better.' And they'll be modest women living pretty ordinary lives, but better lives. — Germaine Greer

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

We can only afford two children' really means, 'We only like clean, well-disciplined middle-class children who go to good schools and grow up to be professionals', for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for the purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family's whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time available. — Germaine Greer

The love object occupies the thoughts of the person diagnosed as 'in love' all the time despite the probability that very little is actually known about it. To it are ascribed all qualities considered by the obsessed as good, regardless of whether the object in question possesses those qualities in any degree. Expectations are set up which no human being could fulfill. Thus the object chosen plays a special role in relation to the go of the obsessed, who decided that he or she is the right or the only person for him. In the case of a male this notion may sanction a degree of directly aggressive behavior either in pursuing the object or driving off competition. — Germaine Greer

Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself. — Germaine Greer

Everybody who meddles with Shakespeare biography readily accepts that the Bard was unfaithful to his wife and excuses him for it, but infidelity on the part of his wife is sufficient to justify estrangement. — Germaine Greer

A garden is the best alternative therapy. — Germaine Greer

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

Every wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband's favourite meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only friend, to encourage him to rejectthe consensus of opinionand find reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops of steel that will strangle them both. — Germaine Greer

A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman's neck. — Germaine Greer

Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother — Germaine Greer

If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality? — Germaine Greer

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

If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion. — Germaine Greer

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

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

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

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

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