Germaine Greer quotes

Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and academic, recognized as a major voice of the feminist movement. Her book "The Female Eunuch" challenged traditional views on gender and sexuality. She continues to provoke debate through her work and public appearances. Here are 165 of her quotes:

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

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

Germaine Greer

Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.

Germaine Greer

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

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

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

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

Germaine Greer

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

Germaine Greer

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

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 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.

Germaine Greer

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

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

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

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 most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.

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

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

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

Germaine Greer