6 Germaine Greer Quotes on Rights

Germaine Greer quotes on rights

3. Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

4. Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

12. The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

17. The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behaviour, 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.

25. Compulsory motherhood is not ennobling, although the friends of the foetus are at pains to point out that most women denied abortions end up loving their issue just the same. Whether they love them just the same as they would have if they had wanted them is of course unverifiable; most women are not so perverse and unjust as to punish their children for the crimes of society (their fathers), but the oppression of their circumstances is real notwithstanding. For the oppressors themselves to take credit for the women's magnanimity is sickeningly smug. The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.

37. How you answer the question, whether individuals should be persuaded to live their whole lives in a state of chemical dependency, first upon contraceptive steroids and then on replacement therapy, depends upon your regard for the autonomy of the individual. If men would not live their lives this way, why should women?