Germaine Greer Quotes - Page 2

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.

Act quickly, think slowly.

If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.

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

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

Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life.

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.

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?

The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity.

Every wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband's favourite meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only friend, to encourage him to rejectthe consensus of opinionand find reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops of steel that will strangle them both.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Lifelong monogamy is a maniacal idea.

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.

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.

Sex is more fun than cars but cars refuel quicker than men.

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

In modern consumer society, the attack on mother-child eroticism took its total form; breastfeeding was proscribed and the breasts reserved for the husband's fetishistic delectation. At the same time, babies were segregated, put into cold beds alone and not picked up if they cried.

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.

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

The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.

Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves-to breakour own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today."Stewart B. Johnson"Men rule because women let them. Male misogyny is real enough, and it has dreadful consequences, but female misogyny is what keeps women out of power.