Germaine Greer: Trending quotes (page 2)

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“Security is the denial of 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.”

“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.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“… 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.”

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

“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.”

“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?”

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