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Age
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The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.
-Germaine Greer
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Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.
-Germaine Greer
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Birth
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The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
-Germaine Greer
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Chastity
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It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent celibacy, by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity backward.
-Germaine Greer
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Children
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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.
-Germaine Greer
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What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.
-Germaine Greer
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Communication
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Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
-Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch 1971, Security
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Contraception, Birth Control
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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.
-Germaine Greer
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Drugs
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Only one thing is certain: if pot is legalized, it won't be for our benefit but for the authorities . To have it legalized will also be to lose control of it.
-Germaine Greer
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Family
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The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
-Germaine Greer
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Freedom
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Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
-Germaine Greer
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Humanity
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The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.
-Germaine Greer
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Libraries
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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.
-Germaine Greer
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Love
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Love, love, love -- all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.
-Germaine Greer
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Marriage
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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.
-Germaine Greer
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Men
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The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.
-Germaine Greer
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All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.
-Germaine Greer
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The most threatened group in human societies as in animal societies is the unmated male: the unmated male is more likely to wind up in prison or in an asylum or dead than his mated counterpart. He is less likely to be promoted at work and he is considered a poor credit risk.
-Germaine Greer
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Men & Women
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I have always been principally interested in men for sex. I've always thought any sane woman would be a lover of women because loving men is such a mess. I have always wished I'd fall in love with a woman. Damn.
-Germaine Greer
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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 civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.
-Germaine Greer
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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.
-Germaine Greer
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After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is. Though feminists have been arguing for years that there is a self-defining female energy, and a female libido that is not expressed merely in response to demands by the male, and a female way of being and of experiencing the world, we are still not close to understanding what it might be. Yet every mother who has held a girl child in her arms has known that she was different from a boy child and that she would approach the reality around her in a different way. She is a female and she will die female, and though many centuries should pass, archaeologists would identify her skeleton as the remains of a female creature.
-Germaine Greer
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Mother
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All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defense. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.
-Germaine Greer
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Revolution
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The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
-Germaine Greer
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Security
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Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.
-Germaine Greer
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Books by and about Germaine Greer