Germaine Greer: Nature herself is not always unambiguous. Sometimes a...

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Germaine Greer

diversity peace culture

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.

Germaine Greer

light lakes dark

Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.

Germaine Greer

achievement self-esteem beautiful

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.

Germaine Greer

faculty energy lost

Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.

Germaine Greer

live-life apology husband

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.

Germaine Greer

thought-provoking reading book

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.

Germaine Greer

independence rewards design

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.

Germaine Greer

wife husband skills

I think that testosterone is a rare poison.

Germaine Greer

testosterone poison thinking

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.

Germaine Greer

opposites ideas thinking

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.

Germaine Greer

height shoes men

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

Germaine Greer

betrayal freedom peace

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

Germaine Greer

happy-birthday happiness life

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.

Germaine Greer

inalienable-rights human-beings humans

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well.

Germaine Greer

communication community strong

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.

Germaine Greer

girl land order

In modern consumer society, the attack on mother-child eroticism took its total form; breastfeeding was proscribed and the breasts reserved for the husband's fetishistic delectation. At the same time, babies were segregated, put into cold beds alone and not picked up if they cried.

Germaine Greer

mother baby children

The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity, permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy.

Germaine Greer

generosity frustration pain

People who are really happy do not concern themselves with convincing others of the fact.

Germaine Greer

happiness facts people

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.

Germaine Greer

pussy tactics fool

Nature herself is not always unambiguous. Sometimes a girl child may have so well-developed a clitoris that it is assumed she is a boy. Likewise, many male children may be underdeveloped, or their genitals deformed or hidden and it is assumed that they are girls.