Top 187 Quotes & Sayings by Germaine Greer

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.

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.

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?

Act quickly, think slowly.

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.

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

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.

Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.

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

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.

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I think that testosterone is a rare poison.

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

Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

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.

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

You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.

There is no such thing as security. There never has been.

Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life.

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.

The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.

The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

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.

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.

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.

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.

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

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

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

The high-heeled shoe is a marvellously contradictory item; it brings a woman to a man's height but makes sure she cannot keep up with him.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.

Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.

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