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

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

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

How often in life do people make that awful sacrifice, that murder of possibilities? — Andrew Sean Greer

Your personal growth, how you show up, and the ways you lead ultimately determine the success of your business and your life. — David J. Greer

At least 35 years ago, you didn't have the internet telling you every single thing that happened in every school and college around the world. — Judy Greer

I find that falling in love is way more fun than just having that instant attraction that you have to maintain for a relationship. — Judy Greer

If I was playing Carrie, I might have done differently but I felt like as my character. I mean, I'm definitely bringing myself to the role but I wanted to pay homage. I hope I did. We'll see. — Judy 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

Make yourself accountable and your employees will hold themselves to a high standard. — David J. Greer

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

I was lucky, and once I moved to L.A., I didn't have to get another job besides acting. But I wouldn't trade my previous jobs for anything. — Judy Greer

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

What Promise of a new day does one have to ignore to laugh so early in the morning? — Leot Felton

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 must be careful what we say to one another. We are almost all we have. — Andrew Sean 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

Who on earth would not long to be fought for? Is this not the very heart of human existence, to be worth fighting for, worth losing everything for? — Andrew Sean 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 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

Well, that episode was the last straw, as my mom explains it, and the Nun Boss basically fired my mom, but even though she was a failed nun and never got to marry God, she went home feeling as if a huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders. — Judy Greer

Hey, man, I toss a stick for a living. Gotta spice up that deal, y'know. Gotta stand out. — Breaux 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

Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape. — Andrew Sean 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

There is no God. Wait. I take that back, there is a God. There must be. The universe is just too perverse
there must be an idiosyncratic mind at the helm. — Elizabeth Kelly

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've long suspected that one of the reasons why human beings haven't yet figured out how to carry on a conversation with bottlenosed porpoises, African gray parrots, et al. in their own language is quite simply that we're terrified of what they might say to us - not least because it's entirely possible that they'd be right. — John Michael 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

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

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

I always had two or three jobs at the same time. I started doing yard work when I was 7 or 8. When I was 13, I got my first state job doing road construction. Between working, sports and school, I hardly ever had free time. — Breaux Greer

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

No sex is better than bad sex. — Germaine Greer

I've been feminist for most of my life, it is a constantly evolving idea, not something static. — Bonnie Greer

I enjoy meeting someone and then really getting to know them and then falling in love. — Judy Greer

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

Dude, I throw a stick. Come on. I get paid a pretty good salary to throw a stick. — Breaux 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

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

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

I want to be softened, not stiff. Pliable, not rigid. I don't want anyone to look at my life and think it is perfect or, worse, that I want them to think it is perfect. Instead, I want anything that is unapproachable or harsh in me to be scrubbed away by the salt and the sand, revealing the imperfections, the brokenness, the cracks. Not because I am proud of those parts, but because I know it is real. Like the Skin Horse or the Velveteen Rabbit, I am shabby because I live life, because I am loved, and because it is all work - living and loving and being loved, being transformed, being worn and faded — Jerusalem Jackson Greer

small changes around the margins, — Carl Greer

Alas, our technology has marched ahead of our spiritual and social evolution, making us, frankly, a dangerous people. — Steven M. Greer

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

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

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

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

True magic happens when we create with our hands and dream from our hearts. — Betsy Greer

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

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 can look up in the air and see where the wind is gonna change direction. — Breaux Greer

Never become too good at something you hate, they'll make you do it the rest of your life. — Ed Greer

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

Margaret herself hadn't known her body was a parish bell tolling at every heartbreak she heard of, and that night with Pete calmly sitting on the edge of her favorite chair, invading her private room with words this room was sealed from, she felt it just as a bell would. It struck her right inside, until her bronze skin rang out the news. Not of Pete's story, which had not even made him cry, but some other story she'd been trying not to tell herself. So she sat stiffly there and wept, clanging and clanging like a thing that tested its own breaking. — Andrew Sean Greer

The future is under no obligation to wait patiently while we get ready for it. — John Michael Greer

Spare me your uninformed teen ideology. — Elizabeth Kelly

We're reaching the point where the Earth will have to end the burden we've placed on her, if we don't lift the burden ourselves. — Steven M. Greer

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

Through her voice I saw a free woman, down on her land, a woman who knew how to kill her own chickens, hunt her own possum, cut her own cotton, fix her own roof, make her own whiskey, walk in her own shoes, and speak her mind, tell her own story.

A black woman.
Ready for the journey.
The Journey. — Bonnie 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

There are hundreds of electromagnetic cases where spacecraft have been observed by police, military personnel and civilians to affect car engines, radios and other electric devices. — Steven M. 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

I do wish I could tell you my age but it's impossible. It keeps changing all the time. — Greer Garson

Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life? — Andrew Sean Greer

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

Life is always better than death. Always. No exceptions. — Greer Macallister

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

I had been a writer all of my life, every waking second, and now that part of my life was over. I suppose the truth was that I had never put myself forward as a writer, I didn't like the idea of the 'professional writer'; I just wanted to write. But that was not how the world worked... — Bonnie Greer

It is almost another kind of love, being loved. It is the same heat but from another room; it is the same sound but from a high window ... — Andrew Sean Greer

I'd been dating my husband for about a year, and I'd already kissed George Clooney, Ashton Kutcher and Gerard Butler. Awesome year, right? — Judy Greer

I met Evan Rachel Wood, James Woods, Kevin Bacon at Sundance. Steve Buscemi is pretty laid-back. I met Judy Greer in Vegas, and she was cool. — Mark Zupan

We think we know people, and dismiss the scenes as aberrations, as the lightning strikes of madness, but surely we are wrong. Surely these are the truest moments of their lives. — Andrew Sean 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

You've heard the phrase 'There are no small roles, just small actors?' Well, I kind of disagree. There are small roles, but when you get a lot of them in a row, you can become a pretty successful actress, and that's what I've done. — Judy Greer

There are lots of kinds of feminism, but ultimately it's about letting people be human beings — Bonnie 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

Robert, that's a little too far off the wall, I think, Greer analyzed. — Tom Clancy

Confession: Having kids did not fix me. I was not somehow more whole, less botched-up, or more certain just because I had a kid ... I was still me, with all my holes and problems and questions - only now I was also exhuasted and had a lot more laundry to do. — Jerusalem Jackson Greer

Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other. — John Michael Greer

I always thought that funerals were meant for the living to say good-bye to a loved one. I never would have guessed that it's actually the other way around. — Anthony Greer

The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person. — Andrew Sean Greer

Keep your life simple and stylish and earnest. Do good and donate your time and money to something you care about. Make people laugh. Be frank. Always give people a second chance - but rarely a third. Live light, travel light, and be light. Forget shit and move on. Make everyone you love feel loved. Waste not, want not. Reuse stuff. Stop trying to get a tan and straighten your hair - you're just not made that way. Go to the movies, go to the library, go to the park. Try to make every day feel as close to a vacation as possible. Floss. — Judy Greer

The impossible happens once to each of us — Andrew Sean 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

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

I've been really fortunate to do so many comedies and then so many dramatic roles and then television and movies and stuff like that. — Judy Greer