Best 211 quotes of Germaine Greer on MyQuotes

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

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

Security is the denial of life

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

Sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearte-ingly than ever before.

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

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.

Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man.

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

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.

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.

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

The consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over.

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.

The drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology.

The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, "Why are there no great women artists?" it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well.

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.

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.

The goal was 'every child a wanted child'; it should also have been 'every abortion a wanted abortion', but the two sides of the phony debate were never to meet.

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 hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of--career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.

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

The older woman's love is not love of herself, nor of herself mirrored in a lover's eyes, nor is it corrupted by need. It is a feeling of tenderness so still and deep and warm that it gilds every grass blade and blesses every fly. It includes the ones who have a claim on it, and a great deal else besides. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

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

The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.

The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity, permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy.

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.

There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men.

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.

There have been women in the past far more daring than we would need to be now, who ventured all and gained a little, but survived after all.

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

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

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

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

The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.

Too many women are forced to abort by poverty, by their menfolk, by their parents. A choice is only possible if there are genuine alternatives.

Two-up is Australia's very own way of parting a fool and his money.

Unless the concepts of work and play and reward for work change absolutely, women must continue to provide cheap labor, and even more, free labor exacted of right by an employer possessed of a contract for life, made out in his favor.

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.

War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests: by war the issue is left to chance, and the tacit assumption that the best man will win is not at all justified. It might equally be argued that the worst, the most unscrupulous man will win, although history will continue the absurd game by finding him after all the best man.

War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests.