Germaine Greer Quotes

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

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

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

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity.

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.

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

I think that testosterone is a rare poison.

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.

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

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.

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

A garden is a kinetic work of art, not an object but a process, open-ended, biodegradable, nurturant, like all women's artistry. A garden is the best alternative therapy.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed.

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

Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter.

A garden is the best alternative therapy.

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.

Security is the denial of life

People who are really happy do not concern themselves with convincing others of the fact.

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

Act quickly, think slowly.

Mother is the dead heart of the family spending father's earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps, and watches the television.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.