Germaine 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

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

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

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

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

It was not until much later when, after a deep and satisfying orgasm, I suddenly realised the true meaning of the fairy tale and the nature of the magic kiss of which it speaks. — Germaine Greer

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

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

God (mentally on my knees), if I can just get through this night, I'll come to church. On Christmas. Every fifteen years. For the next fifteen years. So once. — K.F. Germaine

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

In some ways the operation of the feminine stereotype is so obvious and for many women entirely unattainable, that it can be easily reacted against. It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. Of course, a woman who goes her own way will find her conditioning is ineradicable, but she at least can recognize its operation and choose to counteract it, whereas a man might find that he was being more subtly deluded. — 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

In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. — Germaine Greer

Summing it Up ... "Where's a good place for dinner?" I asked. "There's the Brasserie Lipp on the Avenue St. Germaine," she said, "or La Coupole in Montmartre." "Not La Coupole," I said. "I've been there before. That's the place that's crowded and noisy and smells bad and everybody's rude as hell, isn't it?" "I think you just described France," she said. — P. J. O'Rourke

And while it's all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed. Germaine had the right idea: she was ignorant and lusty, she put her heart and soul into her work. She was a whore all the way through - and that was her virtue! — Henry Miller

What wounds a man mortally is living with a woman,
sharing her bed, and knowing he is not loved. Not even
esteemed. Knowing, that in the eyes of the woman he has
chosen above all others, he is nothing. Nothing at all. — Germaine Shames

There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood what women want and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue. Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic. — Germaine Greer

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

It is in our interests to let the police and their employers go on believing that the Underground is a conspiracy, because it increases their paranoia and their inability to deal with what is really happening. As long as they look for ringleaders and documents they will miss their mark, which is that proportion of every personality which belongs in the Underground. — Germaine Greer

Men are the enemy in much the same way that some crazed boy in uniform was the enemy of another like him in most respects except the uniform. One possible tactic is to try to get the uniforms off. — 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

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

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

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

The second class status of marriage became one of the principal issues in the Reformation. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar, had barely posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg when he took himself a wife. — 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

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

Sexual religion is the opiate of the supermenial. — Germaine Greer

Although some people call me anti-feminist, I know I wasn't because Germaine Greer supported me. — Bernardo Bertolucci

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

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

Virtue . . . is nearly connected with the heart: I have called it Beneficence; not in the very limited sense that is generally given to the term, but to specify thereby all the actions that emanate from active goodness. — Germaine De Stael

We could see that our mothers blackmailed us with self-sacrifice, even if we did not know whether or not they might have been great opera stars or toasts of the town if they had not borne us. In our intractable moments we pointed out that we had not asked to be born, or even to go to an expensive school. We knew that they must have had motives of their own for what they did with us and to us. The notion of our parents' self-sacrifice filled us not with gratitude but with confusion and guilt. We wanted them to be happy yet they were sad and deprived and it was our fault. — Germaine Greer

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

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

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

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

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

As Germaine Greer puts it in The Whole Woman, to become a mother without wanting it is to live like a slave, or domestic animal. — Caitlin Moran

Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living. — Germaine Greer

... the reciprocal obligation from man to man holds the first rank; what regards ourselves, ought to be considered relatively to the influence that we may possess over the destiny of others... — Germaine De Stael

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

It is not just saying prayers that gets results, but it is spending time with the Father, learning His wisdom, drawing on His strength, being filled with His quietness, and basking in His love that bring results to our prayers. Praise the Lord! — Germaine Copeland

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

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

War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests. — Germaine Greer

Rosie Germaine Mole. — Sue Townsend

We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'. — Germaine Greer

The point of an organi family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves. They may accept the services that adults perform for them naturally without establishing dependencies. — Germaine Greer

We live in an age when selfinterest alone seems to determine all of man's acts - and what empathy, what emotion, what enthusiasm can ever grow out of self interest. It is pleasanter to dream of those times of dedication, sacrifice, and heroism that used to be, and that have left honorable traces upon the earth. — Germaine De Stael

The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy, and envy. — Germaine Greer

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

In the struggle to remain a complete person and to love from her fullness instead of her inadequacy a woman may appear hard. She may feel her early conditioning tugging her in the direction of surrender, but she ought to remember that she was originally loved for herself; she ought to hang on to herself and not find herself nagging, helpless, irritable and trapped. Perhaps I am not old enough yet to promise that the self-reliant woman is always loved, but she cannot be lonely as long as there are people in the world who need her joy and her strength, but certainly in my experience it has always been so. 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. A lover who comes to your bed of his own accord is more likely to sleep with his arms around you all night than a lover who has nowhere else to sleep. — Germaine Greer

How you answer the question, whether individuals should be persuaded to live their whole lives in a state of chemical dependency, first upon contraceptive steroids and then on replacement therapy, depends upon your regard for the autonomy of the individual. If men would not live their lives this way, why should women? — 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

A woman is never so happy as when she is being wooed. Then she is mistress of all she surveys, the cynosure of all eyes, until that day of days when she sails down the aisle, a vision in white, lovely as the stefanotis she carries, borne translucent on her father's manly arm to be handed over to her new father-surrogate. If she is clever, and if her husband has the time and the resources, she will insist on being wooed all her life; more likely she will discover that marriage is not romantic, that husbands forget birthdays and aniversaries and seldom pay compliments, are often perfunctory. — 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

On the afternoon of Tuesday, August 14, 1984, three children - Germaine ("Jamie") Elinor Rowan, Adam Robert Ryan and Peter Joseph Savage, all aged twelve - were playing in the road where their houses stood, in the small County Dublin town of Knocknaree. As it was a hot, clear day, many residents were in their gardens, and numerous witnesses saw the children at various times during the afternoon, balancing along the wall at the end of the road, riding their bicycles and swinging on a tire swing. — Tana French

Genius has no sex — Germaine De Stael

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

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

Most people spend their whole lives waging war - against people they don't even know. And against themselves, whom they know least of all.
from BETWEEN TWO DESERTS — Germaine Shames

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

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity. — Germaine Greer

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

You stand fully clothed in a dark room with a spotlight on you. It's bright but not blinding. So bright, you think the light should warm you.

"Will you take off your clothes now, please." he says from the dark.

A calm voice, but definitely a commanding voice. I can imagine when it's raised it could be, but in all the time he never raised it, the tone was always just right; even when he would say. "Yes, please let me hear you moan now. Louder" It was always pitched just right.
Except that one time. — Germaine Gibson

It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. — Germaine Greer

Security is the denial of life — Germaine Greer

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

In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of forty-eight chromosomes only one is different: on this difference we base a complete separation of male and female, pretending as it were that all forty-eight were different. — Germaine Greer

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

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

Among these contemptuous women, poor Germaine had the disadvantage of being young
and almost pretty, in a shy, mousy way. She possessed the nonspecific clumsiness of someone who makes such a constant effort to be inconspicuous that she is creatively awkward
without meaning to, Germaine hoarded attention to herself; her almost electric nervousness disturbed the atmosphere surrounding her. — John Irving

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

Lifelong monogamy is a maniacal idea. — Germaine Greer

Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their 'inferiors'? They would need to shed their desperate need to admire a man, and accept the gentler role of loving him. A learned woman cannot castrate a truck-driver like she can her intellectual rival, because he has no exaggerated respect for her bookish capacities. The alternative to conventional education is not stupidity, and many a clever girl needs the corrective of a humbler soul's genuine wisdom. — 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

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

Nothing comes to a "sleeper" but a "dream"...wake up! — Frederick Germaine

Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse. — Germaine Greer

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

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

The working-class aspirations are worse now than when I was a kid - and it was pretty bad when I was a kid. Reality TV means they are being told they are no longer a working class, they're an underclass. Young lassies want to be Jordan or Jade, but very few aspire to be the next Germaine Greer. — Peter Mullan

No sex is better than bad sex. — Germaine Greer

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother. — Germaine Greer

A child must have care and attention, but that care and attention need not emanate from a single, permanently present individual. Children are more disturbed by changes of place than by changes in personnel around them, and more distressed by friction and ill-feeling between the adults in their environment than by unfamiliarity. — 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

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

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

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

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