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.”

“It is agreed that 'girls take more bringing up' than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue.”

“The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave. A sterilized parent is a eunuch in his children's haremm. to be sure, I recognize that efficient contraception is necessary for sexual pleasure, and that sexual pleasure is necessary, but contraception for economic reasons is another matter. 'We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'. A sterilized parent is forever bound to those children he has, more than ever immobile and predictable, and those children are more securely bound to him. 'We can only afford two children' really means, 'We only like clean, well-discipline middle-class children who grow up to be professionals', for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for that purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family's whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time available. The sterilized parent is the ultimate domestic animal.”

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

“Only one thing is certain: if pot is legalized, it won't be for our benefit but for the authorities. To have it legalized will also be to lose control of it.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The problem of the survival of humanity is not a matter of ensuring the birth of future generations but of limiting it. The immediate danger to humanity is that of total annihilation within a generation or two, not the failure of mankind to breed. A woman seeking alternative modes of life is no longer morally bound to pay her debt to nature.”

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

“If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed.”

“We could see that our mothers blackmailed us with self-sacrifice, even if we did not know whether or not they might have been great opera stars or toasts of the town if they had not borne us. In our intractable moments we pointed out that we had not asked to be born, or even to go to an expensive school. We knew that they must have had motives of their own for what they did with us and to us. The notion of our parents' self-sacrifice filled us not with gratitude but with confusion and guilt. We wanted them to be happy yet they were sad and deprived and it was our fault.”

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

“We can only afford two children' really means, 'We only like clean, well-disciplined middle-class children who go to good schools and grow up to be professionals', for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for the purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family's whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time available.”

“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.”