Germaine Greer Quotes

Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.

Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.

One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.

Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.

Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother

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.

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

In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.

Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures.

Gillard is as likeable as Rudd is charmless. She is self-deprecating; he is ludicrously vainglorious. She is a mistress of understatement; he is a ranter.

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.

Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home.

Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.

Marriage made more sense when it was indissoluble. It's the woman trying to cope with the strains of a one-parent family who will suffer most from the relaxation of the divorce laws.

I find that those men who are personally most polite to women, who call them angels and all that, cherish in secret the greatest contempt for them.

I grew up thinking there was one unpardonable sin – to be boring.

The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.

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

The drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology.

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

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?

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

As soon as we find ourselves working at being indispensable, rigging up a pattern of vulnerability in our loved ones, we know that our love has taken the socially sanctioned form of egotism.

Lifelong monogamy is a maniacal idea.

Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.

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

Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.

Womanpower means the self determination of women, and that means all the baggage of paternalistic society will have to be thrown overboard.

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

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

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.

If a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got?

Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought or not.

Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.

It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance.

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

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

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

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

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

Common morality now treats childbearing as an aberration. There are practically no good reasons left for exercising one's fertility.

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.

English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men.

If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible.

Pigs may like honey, but that doesn't stop it being sweet.

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.

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

We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication.

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.

A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman's neck.