Germaine Greer Quotes - Page 4

Sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearte-ingly than ever before.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role

Despite a lifetime of service to the cause of sexual liberation, I have never caught venereal disease, which makes me feel rather like an Arctic explorer who has never had frostbite.

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

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

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

continuing sexual interest and perfect sexual adjustment between partners who have been together for thirty years is so difficult and rare that no one should feel guilty or inadequate for not having managed it.

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

The drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology.

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.

No sex is better than bad sex.

Developing the muscles of the soul demands no competitive spirit, no killer instinct, although it may erect pain barriers that the spiritual athlete must crash through.

Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.

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

The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.

A woman is never so happy as when she is being wooed. Then she is mistress of all she surveys, the cynosure of all eyes, until that day of days when she sails down the aisle, a vision in white, lovely as the stefanotis she carries, borne translucent on her father's manly arm to be handed over to her new father-surrogate. If she is clever, and if her husband has the time and the resources, she will insist on being wooed all her life; more likely she will discover that marriage is not romantic, that husbands forget birthdays and aniversaries and seldom pay compliments, are often perfunctory.

War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests: by war the issue is left to chance, and the tacit assumption that the best man will win is not at all justified. It might equally be argued that the worst, the most unscrupulous man will win, although history will continue the absurd game by finding him after all the best man.

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

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

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

Awareness of time as flying has some advantages; it precludes boredom, for one thing. It matters little that younger people find older people boring or slow. Older people have a right to resist being rushed, to stand and stare at the fragile world that has become so unspeakably dear to them. For the lucky ones, who will not have to leave while they are still in love with life, there will come a later time when that passion too will fade, but while one is still possessed by that great tenderness, it must be yielded to.

The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.