110+ Germaine Greer Quotes On Education, Friendship And Feminism

Germaine Greer is an Australian feminist and activist. She is best known for her book The Female Eunuch, which helped launch the second wave of feminism in the 1970s. Greer has since become a major figure in the feminist movement, advocating for gender equality and women's rights. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Germaine Greer on education, love, friendship.

Top 10 Germaine Greer Quotes

1. The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.
2. Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
3. 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.
4. Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.
5. Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.
6. A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
7. 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.
8. Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.
• I think that testosterone is a rare poison.
• Soccer is an art more central to our culture than anything the Arts Council deigns to recognize.
• If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed.
• The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
• The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.
• People who are really happy do not concern themselves with convincing others of the fact.
• No sex is better than bad sex.
• I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.
• English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men.

Germaine Greer Quotes About Love

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

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

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. — 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

Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures. — Germaine Greer

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 — Germaine Greer

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. — Germaine Greer

The drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology. — Germaine Greer

As soon as we find ourselves working at being indispensable, rigging up a pattern of vulnerability in our loved ones, we know that our love has taken the socially sanctioned form of egotism. — Germaine Greer

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. — Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer Quotes About World

Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics. — Germaine Greer

In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. — Germaine Greer

Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter. — Germaine Greer

Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them. — 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

Germaine Greer Quotes About Societies

It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. — Germaine Greer

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. — 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

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

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

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

Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it. — Germaine Greer

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

It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance. — Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer Quotes About Security

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

There is no such thing as security. There never has been. — Germaine Greer

Security is the denial of life — Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional. — Germaine Greer

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. — Germaine Greer

After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is. — 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

A garden is a kinetic work of art, not an object but a process, open-ended, biodegradable, nurturant, like all women's artistry. A garden is the best alternative therapy. — Germaine Greer

There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men. — 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

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

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

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

Our life-style contains more Thanatos than Eros, for egotism, exploitation, deception, obsession and addiction have more place in us than eroticism, joy, generosity and spontaneity. — 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 consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over. — Germaine Greer

Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them. — Germaine Greer

The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistadorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern. — Germaine Greer

The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy, and envy. — Germaine Greer

The most popular image of the female despite the exigencies of the clothing trade is all boobs and buttocks, a hallucinating sequence of parabolae and bulges. — Germaine Greer

Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them. — Germaine Greer

Gillard is as likeable as Rudd is charmless. She is self-deprecating; he is ludicrously vainglorious. She is a mistress of understatement; he is a ranter. — Germaine Greer

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. — Germaine Greer

Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother — Germaine Greer

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

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother. — Germaine Greer

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. — Germaine Greer

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

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. — Germaine Greer

The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by obligatory smiles. — Germaine Greer

We can't change the moon but we can live in harmony with its tides, and we can make some ripples of our own. — Germaine Greer

Maybe I couldn — Germaine Greer

The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more. — Germaine Greer

If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality? — Germaine Greer

Lifelong monogamy is a maniacal idea. — Germaine Greer

A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work. — Germaine Greer

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. — Germaine Greer

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. — Germaine Greer

Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought or not. — Germaine Greer

It is agreed that little girls should have a different physical education than little boys, but it is not admitted how much of the difference is counseled by the conviction that little girls should not look like little boys. — Germaine Greer

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. — Germaine Greer

Nature herself is not always unambiguous. Sometimes a girl child may have so well-developed a clitoris that it is assumed she is a boy. Likewise, many male children may be underdeveloped, or their genitals deformed or hidden and it is assumed that they are girls. — 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

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. — Germaine Greer

Once a paper admits any principle of censorship for survival, the we-don't-want-to-do-it-but-we-don't-want-to-lose-the-printer kind of censorship, it jeopardizes the integrity of its editorial principle. It's better to print and be damned, because you'll be damned anyway. — Germaine Greer

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

There have been women in the past far more daring than we would need to be now, who ventured all and gained a little, but survived after all. — Germaine Greer

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

The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent marriage. Otherwise it is a kiss that lies. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called 'Sweethearts,' 'Romantic Secrets' and so forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities. — Germaine Greer

The crowning insult [of abortion] is that this ordeal is represented to her as some kind of a privilege.Her sad and onerous duty is garbed in the rhetoric of a civil right. — Germaine Greer

Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home. — Germaine Greer

We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. — Germaine Greer

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

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. — Germaine Greer

Unless the concepts of work and play and reward for work change absolutely, women must continue to provide cheap labor, and even more, free labor exacted of right by an employer possessed of a contract for life, made out in his favor. — Germaine Greer

Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they might be the normal ones and the heroes are insane. — Germaine Greer

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

Men ought to become more conscious of their bodies as objects of delight. — Germaine Greer

As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue. — Germaine Greer

Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins. — Germaine Greer

A garden is the best alternative therapy. — Germaine Greer

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 — 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

I grew up thinking there was one unpardonable sin – to be boring. — Germaine Greer

When I was a young hippy, I thought marching naked would be a strong protest, but I don't think it would be as effective now. — Germaine Greer

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

A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman's neck. — Germaine Greer

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

The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked. — Germaine Greer

Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room. — Germaine Greer

Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband's often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says What would I do without you? is already destroyed. — Germaine Greer

Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man. — Germaine Greer

Two-up is Australia's very own way of parting a fool and his money. — Germaine Greer

Life Lessons by Germaine Greer

1. Germaine Greer has taught us to be brave and to stand up for what we believe in, no matter the cost. She has also shown us the importance of speaking out against injustice and oppression, and of using our voices to create positive change.
2. Germaine Greer has also taught us the importance of being confident in ourselves and our abilities, and of remaining true to our values and convictions no matter how unpopular they may be.
3. Finally, Germaine Greer has shown us that we can make a difference in the world, no matter our age, gender, or background, and that we should never give up on our dreams and goals.