Germaine Greer Quotes - Page 2

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

A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman's neck. ... [Breasts] are not parts of a person but lures slung around her neck to be kneaded and twisted like magic putty or mumbled and mouthed like lolly ices.

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.

Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.

...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.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate. Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.

Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.

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.

We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'.