Born 1939
Australian writer, academic, journalist
Germaine Greer quotes:
English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men.
Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let's get on with it.
Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.
Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
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.
All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defense. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.
Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.
It's also an oxymoron because what we see is not real.
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.
In our society, the pre-adolescent girl, the nubile virgin, the sexually active woman, the mother and the grandmother are all expected to look and behave in the same way. The correct body outline for them all is girlish; their voices should remain sweet and low, their manner accommodating. ... Kicking off leg-lengthening high-heeled shoes, wiping the colored grease off your lips, raising your voice, letting the grey come through your hair, ceasing the simper that lifts your cheeks and letting your jowls settle into disapproving shapes is seen as letting yourself go.
There is no such thing as security. There never has been.
After thirty years of feminism there is vastly more pornography disseminated more widely than ever before.
It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent "celibacy,'' by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity ''backward.''
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.
Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.
The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
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 essence of pleasure is spontaneity.
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.
Love, love, love -- all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.
It is in our interests to let the police and their employers go on believing that the Underground is a conspiracy, because it increases their paranoia and their inability to deal with what is really happening. As long as they look for ringleaders and documents they will miss their mark, which is that proportion of every personality which belongs in the Underground.
Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband's often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says ''What would I do without you?'' is already destroyed.
I think these things are so political you can't trust them at all. It's madness that I am on the list. It's absurd and completely unjustifiable. Their problem was they had to put an Australian on it. These lists are always so right-wing. It's like the Nobel prize, it is always "people we can do business with."
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.
A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.
The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.
Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.
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 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.
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 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.
You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.
I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.
The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.
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.
The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.
Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.
The most threatened group in human societies as in animal societies is the unmated male: the unmated male is more likely to wind up in prison or in an asylum or dead than his mated counterpart. He is less likely to be promoted at work and he is considered a poor credit risk.
Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?
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.
Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
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.
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.
After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is. Though feminists have been arguing for years that there is a self-defining female energy, and a female libido that is not expressed merely in response to demands by the male, and a female way of being and of experiencing the world, we are still not close to understanding what it might be. Yet every mother who has held a girl child in her arms has known that she was different from a boy child and that she would approach the reality around her in a different way. She is a female and she will die female, and though many centuries should pass, archaeologists would identify her skeleton as the remains of a female creature.
Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.
I think that testosterone is a rare poison.
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.
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.
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.
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.
Our whole lives are lived in a tangle of telling, not telling, misleading, allowing to know, concealing, eavesdropping and collusion. When Washington said he could not tell a lie, his father must have answered, "You had better learn."
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.
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.
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.
Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.
The house wife is an unpaid employee in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee.
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Please feel free to add your favorite Germaine Greer quote in the comments.
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Image source: Australian Stamps Honoring Famous People from Austrailia
Don't I just love Germaine Greer? It's no wonder her outspokenness that I just love made her infamous in the confine of so-called "journo's society's society"; yet made her gained so much respect from the Intellectuals as well. Much as I adore her strong voice, let me just simplify my admiration in her with one quote I choose to quote:
"You're only young once, but you can be immature forever." - this speaks volume!
Go Germaine!
Posted by: Inday Leah | 05/04/2011 at 06:44 PM