Quotes by 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?”

“Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate”

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

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

“The essence of pleasure is spontaneity”

“Youre only young once, but you can be immature forever.”

“Revolution is the festival of the oppressed”

“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.”

“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.”

“The older womans love is not love of herself, nor of herself mirrored in a lovers 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 wouldnt have missed it for the world.”

“The seed of revolution is repression.”

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”

“Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.”

“The revolution... is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.”

“The house wife is an unpaid employee in her husbands house in return for the security of being a permanent employee”

“Only one thing is certain: if pot is legalized, it wont be for our benefit but for the authorities . To have it legalized will also be to lose control of it.”

“After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is. Though feminists have been arguing for years that there is a self-defining female energy, and a female libido that is not expressed merely in response to demands by the male, and a female way of being and of experiencing the world, we are still not close to understanding what it might be. Yet every mother who has held a girl child in her arms has known that she was different from a boy child and that she would approach the reality around her in a different way. She is a female and she will die female, and though many centuries should pass, archaeologists would identify her skeleton as the remains of a female creature.”

“Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.”

“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.”

“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”