Quotes By Germaine Greer

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

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

It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.

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.

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

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.

Act quickly, think slowly.

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.

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

I have always been principally interested in men for sex. I've always thought any sane woman would be a lover of women because loving men is such a mess. I have always wished I'd fall in love with a woman. Damn.

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

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

Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.

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

The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.