War & Peace Quote by Germaine Greer

Greer’s line is a triple-barreled warning about the kinds of life choices people outsource to other people, then resent them for. “Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married” pairs two institutions that sell themselves as noble commitments while reliably producing collateral damage. The point isn’t that marriage equals war; it’s that both are arenas where the consequences are so intimate and irreversible that advice becomes a moral liability. If you counsel someone into either, you’re volunteering to be blamed when the romance curdles or the crusade turns obscene.

The second sentence tightens the screw: “Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present.” Greer doesn’t sentimentalize love; she weaponizes it. The person who loves you is more likely to tell you what threatens your self-image, not what flatters it. “Write down” is a sly command: treat hard counsel like evidence, because your future self will try to rewrite the past into a story where you were never warned.

“He that has no children brings them up well” lands as her nastiest joke, and it’s aimed at sanctimony. The childless can parent perfectly in theory, untroubled by sleep deprivation, guilt, money, boredom, or the simple fact that children are people, not projects. Coming from a feminist activist with a long record of puncturing domestic pieties, the subtext is clear: society romanticizes marriage and parenthood, then punishes honesty about their mess. Greer’s intent is to make you distrust the easy moralizing that surrounds “big” choices and to notice who benefits when you take it.