Germaine Greer

“Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.”

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

“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 and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient arabesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art nouveau, they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female.”

“I got him' is nonsense in terms of love relationships, and so is 'I lost him'. If we could stop thinking in terms of capture, we would not have to fear the loosening of the captives' bonds and our failing beauty, and he would not have ulcers about being outsrtipped or belittled.”

“...the consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over. Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.”

“Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.”

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

“The point of an organi family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves. They may accept the services that adults perform for them naturally without establishing dependencies.”

“In the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality, and as such an indication of aggressive sexuality. Men cultivate it, just as they are encouraged to develop competitive and aggressive instincts, women suppress it, just as they suppress all the aspects of their vigour and libido.”

“When abandoned women follow their fleeing males with tear-stained faces, screaming you can't do this to me, they reveal that all that they have offered in the name of generosity and altruism has been part of an assumed transaction, in which they were entitled to a certain payoff.”

“Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.”

“The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all woman. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others.”

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

“Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.”

“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.”

“Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.”

“I think that testosterone is a rare poison.”

“A housewife's work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not.”

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

“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.”