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

Camille Paglia Quotes #11378
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #49457
#3. If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #64795
#4. Very gifted people may be sociopathic in varying degrees.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #67375
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #75437
#6. A war still rages over the legacy of the 1960s.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #147471
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #169202
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #201591
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #201969
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #202026
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #215759
#12. It's aggravating that Hollywood has never gotten credit for the role it played in promoting modern design.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #234145
#13. Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #235984
#14. The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #236105
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #251962
#16. [W]omen will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #286325
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #304581
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #354713
#19. When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #355335
#20. Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #364584
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #382695
#22. Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #386842
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #399675
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #422253
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #451051
#26. If people could see the inside of my brain, I would be in prison.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #457752
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #474627
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #485161
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #526481
#30. Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #544682
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #547895
#32. Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus , a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #556430
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #598922
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #626518
#35. History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #630203
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #712097
#37. Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #716440
#38. I consider myself not a conservative libertarian but a radical '60s libertarian.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #723473
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #725902
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #757606
#41. Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #789434
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #789576
#43. Nature is always pulling the rug out from under our pompous ideals.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #817732
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #829264
#45. Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #836585
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #840181
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #842813
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #853285
#49. Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improviser. His parables are great one-liners.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #872895
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #927336
#51. Uncritical American boosterism - automatic endorsement of every government action - is myopic and self-defeating.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #953546
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #966646
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #969247
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1003442
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1018958
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1025769
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1033282
#58. Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1050775
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1057698
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1108719
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1146066
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1148324
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1156842
#64. I want young women when they're 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1194629
#65. Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1201226
#66. Sex at the age of 90 is like playing billiards with a rope

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1220110
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1235279
#68. It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1238056
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1269708
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1270165
#71. Even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1272883
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1278515
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1283963
#74. Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1312986
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1337102
#76. Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1343658
#77. What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization , an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1360062
#78. Social justice and compassion are compatible with an intelligent respect for private enterprise and law and order.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1371724
#79. Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1401345
#80. We must accept our pain
Change what we can
and laugh at the rest

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1448449
#81. Mind is a captive of the body.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1464789
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1469847
#83. My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself We need more dissent and less dogma.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1539141
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1567889
#85. When anything goes, it's women who lose.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1608295
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1640044
#87. There is such a thing as seduction, and it needs encouragement rather than discouragement in our puritanical Anglo-American world.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1652033
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1652904
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1653303
#90. Teaching is a performance art.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1671219
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1685857
#92. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1802929
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1803152
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1824373
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1828604
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1835415
#97. [Sarah] Palin is solidifying her status as a bona fide American cultural heroine.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes #1838430
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1847691
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1871477
#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

Camille Paglia Quotes #1875750

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