"Doctors, lawyers and even accountants have always understood that they would have to stand firm, functioning as a solid group protecting its own expertise and hence its earning capacity, from the tendency of all merchants to buy cheap and sell dear. They made of their special knowledge a rare and valuable commodity, insisted on a mystique and protected each other by an immovable professional code. They were cynical enough to know that if they were once cast in the role of public martyrs, working harder and more generously than most other groups of workers, they would be left with nothing but masochism, exhaustion and despair to show for it. Like successful trade unions, who have always worked on the principle that the job is worth whatever you can force the employer to pay for it and not a penny more or less, they understood that nobody was going to pay them their fees out of gratitude, that if they left it to the man whose life they had saved to pay them what he thought fit, they would wind up with half an old penny."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
People from MelbourneWomen academics from AustraliaEssayists from AustraliaNon-fiction authors from AustraliaWomen authors from Australia
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
"'Unhelpful to the workers' cause'" [undated], p. 175
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Germaine_Greer
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Germaine Greer
70 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Germaine Greer →
Related Quotes
"Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've beco…"
"The term eunuchs was used by Eldridge Cleaver to describe blacks. It occurred to me that women were in a somewhat sim…"
"The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enf…"
"Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing."
"No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders."
"Sexism is here a misleading name for misogyny, which is distrust, hatred and contempt of women. And it's not just men…"
"How do we form ourselves into an activity — a force to improve the situation? I don't have the answers. I'm an academ…"
"Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it."
"With them she can discover cooperation, sympathy and love. The end cannot justify the means: if she finds that her re…"
"Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they m…"