Germaine Greer
The high-heeled shoe is a marvellously contradictory item; it brings a woman to a man's height but makes sure she cannot keep up with him.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Design
Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
Security is the denial of lifeCollection: Denial
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.Collection: Book
If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed.Collection: Adoption
Human beings have an unalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.Collection: Insightful
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.Collection: Energy
Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Pussy
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.Collection: Struggle
Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.Collection: Inalienable Rights
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.Collection: Husband
I do think that women could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people’s ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy — when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some heirarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, yet I think it’s women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Love
People who are really happy do not concern themselves with convincing others of the fact.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Husband
The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of--career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle.Collection: Rip
Too many women are forced to abort by poverty, by their menfolk, by their parents. A choice is only possible if there are genuine alternatives.Collection: Choices
Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.Collection: People
I'm passionately opposed to the nuclear family, with its mom and dad and their 2.4 children. I think it's the most neurotic life-style ever developed.Collection: Mom
English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Integrity
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.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Lying
Consensus politics means that you cannot afford to give the many-headed beast, the public, anything to vote against, for voting against is what gargantuan pseudodemocracy has to come down to.Collection: Mean
If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?Collection: War
The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, "Why are there no great women artists?" it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.Collection: Horse
My knees have always been ugly.Collection: Ugly
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Self
The goal was 'every child a wanted child'; it should also have been 'every abortion a wanted abortion', but the two sides of the phony debate were never to meet.Collection: Children
We can't change the moon but we can live in harmony with its tides, and we can make some ripples of our own.Collection: Moon
The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all.Collection: Treatment
We still make love to organs and not people; that so far from realising that people are never more idiosyncratic, never more totally there when they make love, we re never more incommunicative, never more alone.Collection: People
Next time round Hitler will be a machine.Collection: Machines
Women who were housewives, who were pretty miserable ... felt inspired by her book and their life changed. They didn't become megastars, but they became a librarian or something. I've heard women say again and again when the subject of Germaine comes up: 'Well, her book changed my life for the better.' And they'll be modest women living pretty ordinary lives, but better lives.Collection: Life Changing
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.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Sex
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?Collection: Women
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.Collection: Women
Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.Collection: Mean
A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman's neck.Collection: Necks
Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.Collection: Spring
Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home.Collection: Women
Men ought to become more conscious of their bodies as objects of delight.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Struggle
After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Women