Germaine Greer quotes Born: 01/29/1939 Country: united_kingdom

• 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. (Germaine Greer) [human]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [chastity/value/value/time]
• 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. (Germaine Greer)
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [america/men/women/help]
• The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion. (Germaine Greer) [women/men]
• The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood. (Germaine Greer)
• Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it. (Germaine Greer) [measure]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [condition/remember/being/understanding]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [perfect/love/love/discipline]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [result/personality]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [love/love/love/fantasy]
• Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release. (Germaine Greer) [security/prison/threat]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [brotherhood/vanity/love]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [mistake/women/politics/start]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [women/reality/men/being]
• 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) [order/calm/cold/light]
• Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate. (Germaine Greer) [more]
• 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? (Germaine Greer) [willpower/willpower]
• The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough. (Germaine Greer)
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [mother/society/role/psychoanalysis]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [death/society/society/willpower]
• Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity. (Germaine Greer) [time/stranger/love]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [paranoia/look/willpower/personality]
• 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) [path/women/take/joy]
• Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life. (Germaine Greer) [security/security/life]
• There is no such thing as security. There never has been. (Germaine Greer) [thing/security]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [thing/hope-disappointment/society]
• 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) [women/form/willpower/minority]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [group/human/more/prison]
• Woman cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appear something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. 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? (Germaine Greer) [content/health/agility/perversion]
• 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. (Germaine Greer) [women/matter/love/more]

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