A collection of quotes by Germaine Greer on sexuality, feminism, innocence, home, libraries, virginity, fiction, life, beauty, weight, society, sexism and spinster.
76 Great Quotes By Germaine Greer, The Radical Feminist
The feminist Germaine Greer is a writer and journalist who is famous for writing to assure the liberty of women and to solve gender issues. Greer did her graduation from the ‘University of Melbourne and Sydney’ and obtained her PhD from ‘Cambridge University’. After completing her education she acted on television, wrote journals and gave lectures on liberation of women. She wrote her first book ‘The Female Eunuch’ which discussed women’s sexuality and other gender issues. This book was an international bestseller and was translated in eleven languages. Her famous debate with the popular author Norman Miller on women liberation was adapted by the documentary ‘Town Bloody Hall’. She further wrote many books like ‘The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work’ and the ‘Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility’ which nurtured her reputation as a feminist. She also served as a columnist for ‘The Sunday Times’ and ‘The Guardian’. She is known for her outspoken nature and for influencing the lives of many women by her thoughts and life. A lot of what she has said or written has become popular as her quotes and is frequently quoted by people. Go through these quotations and thoughts by Germaine Greer, the great feminist that will compel you to respect women.
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.
Germaine Greer
Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.
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.
If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
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.
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.
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
Germaine Greer
Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.
Germaine Greer
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.
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.
Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.
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.
The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.
Germaine Greer
Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.
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?
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.
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
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.
Those miserable women who blame the men who let them down for their misery and isolation enact every day the initial mistake of sacrificing their personal responsibility for themselves.
...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.
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.
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
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.
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
The patterns of gratification are simple, and seem to fall into two patterns, the Great Bitch and the Poison Maiden.
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.
The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by obligatory smiles.
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
Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned.
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.
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.
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.
It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance.
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.
. I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading. )
