Top 100 Camille Paglia Quotes
#1. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.
Camille Paglia
#2. Straight men who visit prostitutes are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family
in other words, from society, religion, and procreative Mother Nature.
Camille Paglia
#3. If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.
Camille Paglia
#4. Very gifted people may be sociopathic in varying degrees.
Camille Paglia
#5. At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father's business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains.?
Camille Paglia
#7. Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.
Camille Paglia
#8. If colleges and universities are really concerned about women's rights, then they must adjust to a far more flexible structure to allow young women students to take leaves of absence if they want to have children early.
Camille Paglia
#9. The venerable emeritus professors still at Yale when I entered graduate school [in the 1960s] may have been reserved, puritanical WASPs, but they were men of honor who had given their lives to scholarship. Today in the elite schools, honor and ethics are gone.
Camille Paglia
#10. Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.
Camille Paglia
#11. [T]he most viciously intolerant campus I ever visited as a lecturer was Brown, where the humanities program has been gutted by a jejune brand of feminist theory and cultural and media studies.
Camille Paglia
#12. It's aggravating that Hollywood has never gotten credit for the role it played in promoting modern design.
Camille Paglia
#13. Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women.
Camille Paglia
#14. The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.
Camille Paglia
#15. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis.
Camille Paglia
#16. [W]omen will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality.
Camille Paglia
#17. Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel.
Camille Paglia
#18. I love the Web, but the basis of my work is going through the physical books. When you go to the library, you see other books around on the shelves that you never knew existed. You can flip through a book and see the whole outline of it.
Camille Paglia
#19. When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.
Camille Paglia
#20. Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys.
Camille Paglia
#21. The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood.
Camille Paglia
#22. Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones
Camille Paglia
#23. Much violence against women originates in emotional territory that they already command. By midlife and early old age, as the hormones of both genders change, women are in total, despotic control of their marriages.
Camille Paglia
#24. Back in the 1960s, I got a superb education for very little money. The bill for my first year at Harpur College in New York was a few hundred dollars.
Camille Paglia
#25. If people want to be better writers, they can't just read the blogs! You've got to look at something that's outside this rushing world of evanescent words.
Camille Paglia
#26. If people could see the inside of my brain, I would be in prison.
Camille Paglia
#27. All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!
Camille Paglia
#28. My grandfather worked in a shoe factory - he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family.
Camille Paglia
#29. Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women.
Camille Paglia
#31. Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.
Camille Paglia
#32. Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus , a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed.
Camille Paglia
#33. The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.
Camille Paglia
#34. Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.
Camille Paglia
#35. History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence.
Camille Paglia
#36. I was the first to advocate the Web. But I am very troubled by this thing that every kid must have a laptop computer. The kids are totally in the computer age. There's a whole new brain operation that's being moulded by the computer.
Camille Paglia
#38. I consider myself not a conservative libertarian but a radical '60s libertarian.
Camille Paglia
#39. My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.
Camille Paglia
#40. Popular culture - above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R & B roots - did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader.
Camille Paglia
#41. Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork.
Camille Paglia
#42. I believe that everybody has the right to view his or her own body as a palette. However, I think intellectuals should at least try to be role models.
Camille Paglia
#43. Nature is always pulling the rug out from under our pompous ideals.
Camille Paglia
#44. Hollywood, America's greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind.
Camille Paglia
#45. Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.
Camille Paglia
#46. Western man represents himself, on the political or psychological stage, in a spectacular world-theater. Our personality is innately cinematic, light-charged projections flickering on the screen of Western consciousness.
Camille Paglia
#47. We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.
Camille Paglia
#48. Not since the Black Panthers sailed into their Upper East Side tea party has there been so daffy an exercise in radical chic.
Camille Paglia
#49. Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improviser. His parables are great one-liners.
Camille Paglia
#50. Lesbian feminists, for all their ideals of sisterhood and solidarity, can treat each other with a fickleness, a parasitic exploitativeness, and vicious spite that have to be seen to be believed.
Camille Paglia
#51. Uncritical American boosterism - automatic endorsement of every government action - is myopic and self-defeating.
Camille Paglia
#52. Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaver-like tunneling to the top.
Camille Paglia
#53. Freud says, Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling. Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant.
Camille Paglia
#54. Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its puerile, paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex.
Camille Paglia
#55. Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome.
Camille Paglia
#56. Love is a crowded theater, for as Harold Bloom remarks, We can never embrace (sexually or otherwise) a single person, but embrace the whole of her or his family romance.
Camille Paglia
#57. Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt.
Camille Paglia
#58. Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders.
Camille Paglia
#59. There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.
Camille Paglia
#60. In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace.
Camille Paglia
#61. As a longtime fan of talk radio, I'm very worried about the low opinion that conservative hosts and callers have of the American artist. Art is portrayed as a scam, a rip-off and snow job pushed by snobbish elites.
Camille Paglia
#62. I am waiting impatiently for the day when beleaguered, like-minded academics can order James Wolcott's collected essays for their classes.
Camille Paglia
#63. Anyone who gets his or her political news primarily from the New York Times (which made the ethically challenged carpetbagger Hillary a senator) is a fool.
Camille Paglia
#64. I want young women when they're 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives.
Camille Paglia
#65. Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.
Camille Paglia
#66. Sex at the age of 90 is like playing billiards with a rope
Camille Paglia
#67. When I meet gay men anywhere in the world, there is a spontaneity and a spirit of fun and mischief that lesbians seem incapable of.
Camille Paglia
#68. It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal.
Camille Paglia
#69. Greek pederasty honored the erotic magnetism of male adolescence in a way that today brings police to the door. Children are more conscious and perverse than parents like to think.
Camille Paglia
#70. Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.
Camille Paglia
#71. Even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.
Camille Paglia
#72. We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.
Camille Paglia
#73. All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics and politics were invented by men. But by the Promethean law of conflict and capture, woman has a right to seize what she will and vie with man on her own terms.
Camille Paglia
#74. Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs.
Camille Paglia
#75. Working moms commonly testify that they feel guilty when they are away from their children and guilty when they are not at their jobs. Devoted fathers certainly miss their children deeply, but it does not seem to be with the same gnawing, primal anxiety that often afflicts women.
Camille Paglia
#76. Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality.
Camille Paglia
#77. What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization , an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.
Camille Paglia
#78. Social justice and compassion are compatible with an intelligent respect for private enterprise and law and order.
Camille Paglia
#79. Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.
Camille Paglia
#80. We must accept our pain
Change what we can
and laugh at the rest
Camille Paglia
#82. Computer enhancement has spread to still photography in advertisements, fashion pictorials, and magazine covers, where the human figure and face are subtly elongated or remodeled at will. Caricature is our ruling mode.
Camille Paglia
#83. My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself We need more dissent and less dogma.
Camille Paglia
#84. Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women's movement of the late 1960s and '70s.
Camille Paglia
#86. In the real world, very smart people fail and mediocre people rise. Part of what makes people fail or succeed are skills that have nothing to do with IQ. Also, the idea that intelligence can be gauged by an IQ test is erroneous.
Camille Paglia
#87. There is such a thing as seduction, and it needs encouragement rather than discouragement in our puritanical Anglo-American world.
Camille Paglia
#88. All great stars are competitive. That's a sign of a true artist - if you don't have the fire of competition deep down inside, you're never going to achieve anything. You have to want to be king of the heap.
Camille Paglia
#89. Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.
Camille Paglia
#91. Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.
Camille Paglia
#92. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
Camille Paglia
#93. And I found in my study that history is cyclic, and everywhere in the world you find this pattern in ancient times: that as a culture begins to decline, you have an efflorescence of transgender phenomena. That is a symptom of cultural collapse.
Camille Paglia
#94. Ballet is the body rising. Ballet is ceremonial and hieratic. Its disdain for the commonplace material world is the source of its authority and glamour.
Camille Paglia
#95. I have a long view of history - my orientation is archaeological because I'm always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt.
Camille Paglia
#96. Nature, I have constantly argued in my work, is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is the ultimate disposer of human fate, randomly recarving geography over 10,000-year epochs.
Camille Paglia
#97. [Sarah] Palin is solidifying her status as a bona fide American cultural heroine.
Camille Paglia
#98. There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.
Camille Paglia
#99. Human beings are not nature's favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.
Camille Paglia
#100. Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.
Camille Paglia
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