Germaine Greer Quotes

Properly speaking, altruism is an absurdity. Women are self-sacrificing in direct proportion to their incapacity to offer anything but this sacrifice. They sacrifice what they never had: a self. The cry of the deserted woman, 'What have I done to deserve this?' reveals at once the false emotional economy that she has been following.

Lies are vile things, with a horrible life of their own. They contaminate the truth that surrounds them.

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.

Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.

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.

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.

The Poison Maiden has conceived by him, and is plumb ready to enter the divine category of mother, only one last fiend clubs her to death. The final clinch of male romanticism is that each man kills the thing he loves; whether she be Catharine in A Farewell to Arms, or the Grecian Urn, the 'tension that she be perfect' means that she must die, leavinf the hero's status as a great lover unchallenged. The pattern is still commonplace: the hero cannot marry. The sexual exploit must be conquest, not cohabitation and mutual tolerance.

Sexual religion is the opiate of the supermenial.

Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.

The new ideology of marriage needed its mythology and
Shakespeare supplied it. Protestant moralists sought to redeem
marriage from the status of a remedy against fornication by underplaying
the sexual component and addressing the husband as the
wife’s friend.

With them she can discover cooperation, sympathy and love. The end cannot justify the means: if she finds that her revolutionary way leads only to further discipline and continuing incomprehension, with their corollaries of bitterness and diminution, no matter how glittering the objective which would justify it, she must understand that it is a wrong way and an illusory end. 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 which is the reflowering of etiolated energy. Only these can sustain her and keep the flow of energy coming. The problems are only equalled by the possibilities: every mistake made is redeemed when it is understood. The only ways in which she can feel such joy are radical ones: the more derided and maligned the action that she undertakes, the more radical.

Spirituality, by which I mean the purity of a strong and noble nature,
with all the new and untried powers that must grow out of it — has
not yet appeared on our horizon; and its absence is a natural consequence
of a diversity of interests between man and woman, who
are for the most part brought together through the attraction of
passion; and who, but for that, would be as far asunder as the poles.

The chief means of liberating women is replacing of compulsiveness and compulsion by the pleasure principle. Cooking, clothes, beauty, and housekeeping are all compulsive activities in which the anxiety quotient has long since replaced the pleasure or achievement quotient. It is possible to use even cooking, clothes, cosmetics and housekeeping for fun. The essence of pleasure is spontaneity. In these cases spontaneity means rejecting the norm, the standard that one must live up to, and establishing a self-regulating principle.

Security is the denial of life

One version of the Austen scenario holds that it is all about stalking and bringing down your man, but Jane Austen is not the editor of Cosmopolitan. The point is not to achieve the man at any cost. He is not the prey or the prize but the symbol of merit. The possibility that there may be no such man is always present. Part of our gratified surprise at the Austen happy ending is that there was a man around with the good sense to see that a woman without rich and powerful connections might be a pearl beyond price, a woman whose company was reward in itself. We know that she is good company because we have been seeing the world through her disabused eyes. We go on reading and watching Jane Austen because she is good for us.