Quotes By 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.

It strikes me as very strange that whereas Tennyson could support most of Mr. Buckley's propositions about free trade, and the private sector, and private enterprise, Tennyson found no difficulty also in lending intellectual support to the idea of Women's Liberation.

Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage.

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

I think that testosterone is a rare poison.

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.

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

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

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.

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

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

English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men.