{"author":"Germaine Greer","author_id":"Germaine+Greer","total_quotes":80,"quotes":[{"text":"If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.","author":"Germaine Greer","tags":["female-liberation","feminism"],"id":1193,"author_id":"Germaine+Greer"},{"text":"A child must have care and attention, but that care and attention need not emanate from a single, permanently present individual. Children are more disturbed by changes of place than by changes in personnel around them, and more distressed by friction and ill-feeling between the adults in their environment than by unfamiliarity.","author":"Germaine Greer","tags":["conciliation-of-work-and-family","feminism","women-emancipation"],"id":5975,"author_id":"Germaine+Greer"},{"text":"If women could regard childbearing not as a duty or an inescapable destiny but as a privilege to be worked for, the ay 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.","author":"Germaine Greer","tags":["childbearing","children","gratitude","parenting"],"id":10991,"author_id":"Germaine+Greer"},{"text":"Man is jealous because of his amour propre woman is jealous because of her lack of it. ","author":"Germaine Greer","tags":["man","woman","jealous "],"id":14496,"author_id":"Germaine+Greer"},{"text":"We could see that our mothers blackmailed us with self-sacrifice, even if we did not know whether or not they might have been great opera stars or toasts of the town if they had not borne us. In our intractable moments we pointed out that we had not asked to be born, or even to go to an expensive school. We knew that they must have had motives of their own for what they did with us and to us. The notion of our parents' self-sacrifice filled us not with gratitude but with confusion and guilt. We wanted them to be happy yet they were sad and deprived and it was our fault.","author":"Germaine Greer","tags":["children","parenting-advice","self-sacrifice"],"id":16978,"author_id":"Germaine+Greer"},{"text":"Properly speaking, altruism is an absurdity. Women are self-sacrificing in direct proportion to their incapacity to offer anything but this sacrifice. They sacrifice what they never had: a self. The cry of the deserted woman, 'What have I done to deserve this?' reveals at once the false emotional economy that she has been following.","author":"Germaine Greer","tags":["divorce","feminism","marriage"],"id":17690,"author_id":"Germaine+Greer"},{"text":"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.","author":"Germaine Greer","tags":["marriage","martin-luther","reformation"],"id":21592,"author_id":"Germaine+Greer"},{"text":"A housewife's work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not.","author":"Germaine Greer","tags":["feminism","housewives","parenting"],"id":56202,"author_id":"Germaine+Greer"},{"text":"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.","author":"Germaine Greer","tags":["light","calm","dark "],"id":58940,"author_id":"Germaine+Greer"},{"text":"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.","author":"Germaine Greer","tags":["female-competition","feminism"],"id":60258,"author_id":"Germaine+Greer"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":80,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}