Germaine Greer: Most

“Great art, for those who insist upon this rather philistine concept (as if un-great art were unworthy of even their most casual and ill-informed attention), makes us stand back and admire.”

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

Source: The Obstacle Race (1979), Chapter V: Dimension (p. 105)
Context: Great art, for those who insist upon this rather philistine concept (as if un-great art were unworthy of even their most casual and ill-informed attention), makes us stand back and admire. It rushes upon us pell-mell like the work of Rubens or Tintoretto or Delacroix, or towers above us. There is of course another aesthetic: the art of a Vermeer or a Braque seeks not to amaze and appal but to invite the observer to come closer, to close with the painting, peer into it, become intimate with it. Such art reinforces human dignity.

Art

“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

“The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.”

Germaine Greer

Chapter 2 http://books.google.com/books?id=7MGFAAAAIAAJ&q=%22The+management+of+fertility+is+one+of+the+most+important%22+%22of+adulthood%22&pg=PA40#v=onepage
Sex and Destiny : The Politics of Human Fertility (1984)

Adulthood

“The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.”

Germaine Greer

Liberation (pg. 336)
The Whole Woman (1999)

Women , Health , Beauty , Dependency

“Doctors, lawyers and even accountants have always understood that they would have to stand firm, functioning as a solid group protecting its own expertise and hence its earning capacity, from the tendency of all merchants to buy cheap and sell dear. They made of their special knowledge a rare and valuable commodity, insisted on a mystique and protected each other by an immovable professional code. They were cynical enough to know that if they were once cast in the role of public martyrs, working harder and more generously than most other groups of workers, they would be left with nothing but masochism, exhaustion and despair to show for it. Like successful trade unions, who have always worked on the principle that the job is worth whatever you can force the employer to pay for it and not a penny more or less, they understood that nobody was going to pay them their fees out of gratitude, that if they left it to the man whose life they had saved to pay them what he thought fit, they would wind up with half an old penny.”

Germaine Greer

"'Unhelpful to the workers' cause'" [undated], p. 175
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)

Life , Knowledge , Success , Despair

“The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.”

Germaine Greer

"Eternal war: Strindberg's view of sex" (3 June 1978), p. 207
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)

Men

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

Germaine Greer

"Not a time to die" (3 December 1972), p. 147
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)

People

“How do we form ourselves into an activity—a force to improve the situation? I don't have the answers. I'm an academic—[we're] the most useless people in the world.”

Germaine Greer

FemiFest radical feminist conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7b59mFyREY&t=9m25s, London (31 August 2014)

World , People