Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

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

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

— Germaine Greer

No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders.

— Germaine Greer

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

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

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

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

The stereotype is the Eternal Femine. 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

Nobody wants a girl whose beauty is imperceptible to all but him...

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

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

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

— Germaine Greer

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

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

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

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

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

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

— Germaine Greer

They still say "fuck you" as a venomous insult; they still find "cunt" the most degrading epithet outside the dictionary.

— Germaine Greer

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

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

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

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

— Germaine Greer

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.

— Germaine Greer

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

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

— Germaine Greer

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

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

— Germaine Greer

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

As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.

— Germaine Greer

Next time round Hitler will be a machine.

— Germaine Greer

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

Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.

— Germaine Greer

The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.

— Germaine Greer

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

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

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

This sequel to The Female Eunuch is the book I said I would never write.

— Germaine Greer

A woman's pleasure is not dependent upon the presence of a penis in the vagina; neither is a man's.

— Germaine Greer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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