Quotes from Germaine Greer

Sexual religion is the opiate of the supermenial.

Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.

We still make love to organs and not people.

In 'The Female Fear: The Social Cost of Rape', Margaret T Gordon and Stephanie Riger say that fully one-third of the women in their study reported worrying about rape once a month or more. Others said the the fear of rape is just something lives in the back of their minds at all times, even when it wasn't present in conscious thought. Another third of the participants claimed to never worry about rape but even so they took precautions to guard against it.

some claim that one is only ever really in love once in a lifetime, others that it is better the second time around, others that the first time is the only genuine manifestation, still others that they fall in love every week or even every day.

We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don't. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are to well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It's meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth.

Probably the commonest form of non-criminal rape is rape by fraud - by phoney tenderness or false promises of an enduring relationship, for example.

For love's sake women must reject the roles that are offered to them in our society. As impotent, insecure, inferior beings they can never love in a generous way.

If women could regard childbearing not as a duty or an inescapable destiny but as a privilege to be worked for, the way a man might work for the right to have a family, children might grow up without the burden of gratitude for the gift of life which they never asked for.

At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equaling Hals at his best, had been discovered.

Society seems to find it irresistible to characterise the "unworldliness" of the male intellectual and academic in terms of his failure to control the women in his life.

whatever else we are or may pretend to be, we are certainly our bodies

Deny a young boy the right to have a toy gun and you will suppress his destructive urges, and he will turn out to be a homosexual - or worse!

The new ideology of marriage needed its mythology and Shakespeare supplied it. Protestant moralists sought to redeem marriage from the status of a remedy against fornication by underplaying the sexual component and addressing the husband as the wife's friend.

The second class status of marriage became one of the principal issues in the Reformation. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar, had barely posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg when he took himself a wife.

Numinbah Valley

Everybody who meddles with Shakespeare biography readily accepts that the Bard was unfaithful to his wife and excuses him for it, but infidelity on the part of his wife is sufficient to justify estrangement.

The opponents of female suffrage lamented that woman's emancipation would mean the end of marriage, morality and the state; their extremism was more clear-sighted than the woolly benevolence of liberals and humanists, who thought that giving women a measure of freedom would not upset anything. When we reap the harvest which the unwitting suffragettes sowed we shall see that the anti-feminists were after all right.

Just as it is not the penis that commits rape, and not testosterone that drives it and not overwhelming sexual desire either, castration whether surgical or chemical will not eliminate men's hatred of women.

Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.

Spirituality, by which I mean the purity of a strong and noble nature, with all the new and untried powers that must grow out of it—has not yet appeared on our horizon; and its absence is a natural consequence of a diversity of interests between man and woman, who are for the most part brought together through the attraction of passion; and who, but for that, would be as far asunder as the poles.

The most holy band of society is friendship. Mary Wollstonecraft, 'A Vindication of the Rights of Women'

L'energia è il potere che guida ogni essere umano. Non viene persa con l'impiego ma mantenuta dallo stesso, perché è una facoltà della psiche.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.