Germaine Greer: Trending quotes (page 2)

“Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth.”

Germaine Greer The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work

Source: The Obstacle Race (1979), Chapter VII: The Disappearing Oeuvre (p. 134)
Context: Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.

Spring , Birth , Time

“The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

Introduction
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Context: 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. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.

Fear , Freedom , Strong

“In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.”

Germaine Greer

"Still in Melbourne, January 1987"
Source: Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989)
Context: 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. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.

World , Home

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

Germaine Greer

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

Germaine Greer

Sadness , Spring

“Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.”

Germaine Greer

Sleep , Reading

“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?”

Germaine Greer

Shoe

“Security is the denial of life”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

Source: The Female Eunuch

Life

“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 book The Female Eunuch

Source: The Female Eunuch

Courage

“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.”

Germaine Greer

Loneliness

“Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?”

Germaine Greer

Women , Beauty

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

Germaine Greer

The Times, London (1986-02-01)

“I find that those men who are personally most polite to women, who call them angels and all that, cherish in secret the greatest contempt for them.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

Source: The Female Eunuch

Women , Men , Secret , Angels

“Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

Source: The Female Eunuch

“Those miserable women who blame the men who let them down for their misery and isolation enact every day the initial mistake of sacrificing their personal responsibility for themselves.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

Source: The Female Eunuch

Women , Men , Personality

“… 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.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

Source: The Female Eunuch

Freedom

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

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

p. 263 http://books.google.com/books?ei=7hdeUeCtEOGmiQLnu4HYBg&id=x88du4E7ARAC&dq=%22The+Female+Eunuch%22+1971&q=%22hate+them%22#search_anchor
Often paraphrased as: "women have no idea how much men hate them."
The Female Eunuch (1970)

Women , Men , Hate , Idea

“In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death.”

Germaine Greer

Mothers (pg. 209)
The Whole Woman (1999)

Death , Personality

“If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?”

Germaine Greer

Sorrow (pg. 189)
The Whole Woman (1999)

War , Time , Anger

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

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

Womanpower (p. 128)
The Female Eunuch (1970)