Germaine Greer Quotes
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The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of--career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle.
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Kinkiness comes from low energy. It's the substitution of lechery for lust.
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A woman is never so happy as when she is being wooed. Then she is mistress of all she surveys, the cynosure of all eyes, until that day of days when she sails down the aisle, a vision in white, lovely as the stefanotis she carries, borne translucent on her father's manly arm to be handed over to her new father-surrogate. If she is clever, and if her husband has the time and the resources, she will insist on being wooed all her life; more likely she will discover that marriage is not romantic, that husbands forget birthdays and aniversaries and seldom pay compliments, are often perfunctory.
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Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage.
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The consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over.
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The most highly prized curve of all is that of the bosom.
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Human beings have an unalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.
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Rescuing women from their burden of unwarranted guilt is going to require "educational practices and socializing agents" even more effective than the ones that have been relentlessly loading female humans with responsibility for other people's behavior from their earliest childhood.
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Marriage made more sense when it was indissoluble. It's the woman trying to cope with the strains of a one-parent family who will suffer most from the relaxation of the divorce laws.
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Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.
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The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behavior, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.
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Womanpower means the self determination of women, and that means all the baggage of paternalistic society will have to be thrown overboard.
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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.
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Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home.
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Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband's often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says 'What would I do without you?' is already destroyed.
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Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilisation and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.
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Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.
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Bollocks have never frightened me. I'll eat a bollock any time.
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Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.
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One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
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The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.
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The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all.
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A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
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Sex is more fun than cars but cars refuel quicker than men.
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We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.
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Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures.
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The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
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At the same time as woman was becoming the showcase for wealth and caste, while men were slipping into relative anonymity and "handsome is as handsome does," she was emerging as the central emblem of western art.
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I grew up thinking there was one unpardonable sin – to be boring.
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Men have still not realized that letting women do so much of the work for so little reward makes a man in the house an expensive luxury rather than a necessity.
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