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Germaine Greer
59 quotes
“Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives — to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It's a process that sacrifices vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one that's got to be changed.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Germaine Greer — Opinions That May Shock the Faithful" by Judith Weinraub in The New York Times (22 March 1971)
“The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Article "Abortion", The Sunday Times (21 May 1972)
“Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Times, London (1 February 1986)
“No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Newsnight Review (24 July 2009)
“How do we form ourselves into an activity — a force to improve the situation? I don't have the answers. I'm an academic — the most useless people in the world.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: FemiFest radical feminist conference, London (31 August 2014)
“Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In that mysterious dimension where the body meets the soul the stereotype is born and has her being. She is more body than soul, more soul than mind. To her belongs all that is beautiful, even the very word beauty itself. All that exists, exists to beautify her.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the sexual object sought by all men, and all women. She is of neither sex for she herself has no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. She need achieve nothing, for she is the reward of achievement. She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because virtue is assumed from her loveliness, and her passivity.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nobody wants a girl whose beauty is imperceptible to all but him...”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is more chilling than such a spectacle of unremitting self-sacrifice. This is a woman born to be abandoned by her ungrateful husband at the very pinnacle of success she helped to make for him, for a shameless hussy of nineteen.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The failure of women to produce great works of art and all that can be explained in terms of this statement. Insofar as she escapes or rejects her conditioning, the little girl may excel in those kinds of intellectual activity that are called creative, but eventually she either capitulates to her conditioning, or the conflicts become so pressing that her efficiency is hampered.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The principle of the brotherhood of man is that narcissistic one, 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.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They still say "fuck you" as a venomous insult; they still find "cunt" the most degrading epithet outside the dictionary.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Great art, for those who insist upon this rather philistine concept (as if un-great art were unworthy of even their most casual and ill-informed attention), makes us stand back and admire. It rushes upon us pell-mell like the work of Rubens or Tintoretto or Delacroix, or towers above us. There is of course another aesthetic: the art of a Vermeer or a Braque seeks not to amaze and appal but to invite the observer to come closer, to close with the painting, peer into it, become intimate with it. Such art reinforces human dignity.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, 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 (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kinkiness comes from low energy. It's the substitution of lechery for lust.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A groupie's vision" (October 1969), p. 10
“Once a paper admits any principle of censorship for survival, the we-don't-want-to-do-it-but-we-don't-want-to-lose-the-printer kind of censorship, it jeopardizes the integrity of its editorial principle. It's better to print and be damned, because you'll be damned anyway.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The million-dollar Underground" (July 1969), p. 15
“The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Wet Dream Film Festival" (1971), p. 57
“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.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Wet Dream Film Festival" (1971), p. 57
“As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A needle for your pornograph" (22 July 1971), p. 67
“Next time round Hitler will be a machine, developed by male conquest as the most efficient method of subduing the peoples of the earth. Our only hope is that we have yet time to breed a generation which cannot be ruled in such a way or seek such a way to rule. We have no more need of great generals, for war is no longer fought by men but by machines against men. Machines are not mortal nor do they feel pain, so they must perforce win the war, unless the last of the fantasy heroes can acknowledge his weakness and his terror, and beg pardon.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: My Mailer Problem" Esquire (September 1971), p. 93
“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 (born 1939) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Big Tease" (October 1972), p. 138
“Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Not a time to die" (3 December 1972), p. 147
“The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Eternal war: Strindberg's view of sex" (3 June 1978), p. 207
“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. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Still in Melbourne, January 1987", as quoted in
“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 (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even if it had been real, equality would have been a poor substitute for liberation; fake equality is leading women into double jeopardy. The rhetoric of equality is being used in the name of political correctness to mask the hammering that women are taking. When The Female Eunuch was written our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves. On every side speechless women endure endless hardship, grief and pain, in a world system that creates billions of losers for every handful of winners. It's time to get angry again.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A woman's pleasure is not dependent upon the presence of a penis in the vagina; neither is a man's.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Regardless of the dutiful pushing of condoms in the girls' press, the exposure of baby vaginas and cervixes to the penis is more likely to result in pregnancy and infection than orgasm.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm actually passionately opposed to double beds, they're probably more responsible for bad sex than any other single piece of furniture.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The term eunuchs was used by Eldridge Cleaver to describe blacks. It occurred to me that women were in a somewhat similar position. Blacks had been emancipated from slavery but never given any kind of meaningful freedom, while women were given the vote but denied sexual freedom. In the final analysis, women aren't really free until their libidos are recognized as separate entities. Some of the suffragettes understood this. They could see the connection among the vote, political power, independence and being able to express their sexuality according to their own experience, instead of in reference to a demand by somebody else. But they were regarded as crazy and were virtually crucified. Thinking about them, I suddenly realized, Christ, we've been castrated and that's what it's all about. You see, it's all very well to let a bullock out into the field when you've already cut his balls off, because you know he's not going to do anything. That's exactly what happened to women.”
Germaine Greer (born 1939) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On how she chose the title for The Female Eunuch, in an interview by Nat Lehrman in Playboy (January 1972)