Top 100 Paglia Quotes
#1. Camille Paglia is: 'the nipple-pierced person's Phyllis Schlafly who poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters.
Naomi Wolf
#2. As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought.
Wendy Kaminer
#4. I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.
Leslie Fiedler
#5. Today, the ideal male is the gay man and the ideal female is the worker female, the woman who can work in a coal mine just like all the other men.
Camille Paglia
#6. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.
Camille Paglia
#7. Butchery is not the point of vampirism. Sex - domination and submission - is.
Camille Paglia
#8. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.
Camille Paglia
#9. The born-yesterday French-besotted faddists, addicted sniffers of wet printer's ink, think they're starting on the ground floor; so they're condemned to another hundred years of trial and error. The rest of us can safely ignore them.
Camille Paglia
#10. I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America's most original and courageous political analysts. He has the true 1960s spirit - audacious and irreverent, yet passionately engaged and committed to social change.
Camille Paglia
#12. 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
#13. My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm-as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.
Camille Paglia
#14. American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation.
Camille Paglia
#15. Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity.
Camille Paglia
#16. If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.
Camille Paglia
#17. Very gifted people may be sociopathic in varying degrees.
Camille Paglia
#18. 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
#19. Academic Marxism is a fantasy world, and unctuous compassion-sweepstakes, into which real workers or peasants never penetrate.
Camille Paglia
#20. Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.
Camille Paglia
#21. The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity's ancient campaign against pagan nature.?
Camille Paglia
#22. The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it.
Camille Paglia
#23. We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives.
Camille Paglia
#24. Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things , which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau.
Camille Paglia
#25. My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility
Camille Paglia
#26. A society that forgets about art risks loslng its soul.
Camille Paglia
#27. Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends.
Camille Paglia
#29. Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.
Camille Paglia
#30. Christianity began as a religion of the poor and dispossessed - farmers, fishermen, Bedouin shepherds. There's a great lure to that kind of simplicity and rigor - the discipline, the call to action.
Camille Paglia
#32. 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
#33. I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care.
Camille Paglia
#34. The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.
Camille Paglia
#35. American feminism's nose dive began when Kate Millet, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies.
Camille Paglia
#36. Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.
Camille Paglia
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?
Camille Paglia
#41. [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
#42. The saints, many of them women, warred with themselves as well as God. The body has its own animal urges, just as there are attractions and repulsions in sex that modern liberalism cannot face.
Camille Paglia
#43. The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force.
Camille Paglia
#44. [W]earisome as it may seem, women must realize that, in making a commitment to a man, they have merged in his unconscious with his mother and have therefore inherited the ambivalence of that relationship.
Camille Paglia
#45. Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.
Camille Paglia
#46. The airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan - it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.
Camille Paglia
#47. It's aggravating that Hollywood has never gotten credit for the role it played in promoting modern design.
Camille Paglia
#48. Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women.
Camille Paglia
#49. The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.
Camille Paglia
#50. Beauty is our escape from the murky flesh-envelope that imprisons us.
Camille Paglia
#51. 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
#52. In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called "conservative," as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives.
Camille Paglia
#53. [W]omen will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality.
Camille Paglia
#54. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.
Camille Paglia
#55. I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels.
Camille Paglia
#56. 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
#57. Daytime soap operas, which I used to adore, have been declining in quality and importance for over a decade, and I gradually stopped monitoring them.
Camille Paglia
#58. My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.
Camille Paglia
#59. Despite hundreds of studies, cause-and-effect relationship between pornography and violence has never been satisfactorily proved. ?
Camille Paglia
#60. I sometimes call my new system 'Italian pagan Catholicism,' but it could more accurately be called 'pragmatic liberalism,' with roots in Enlightenment political philosophy. It is a synthesis of the enduring dual elements in our culture, pagan and Judeo-Christian, Romantic and Classic.
Camille Paglia
#61. You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered.
Camille Paglia
#62. Your life is a Fellini film, lacking only Anita Ekberg with a cat on her head.
Camille Paglia
#63. 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
#64. When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.
Camille Paglia
#65. The post-war "publish or perish" tyranny must end. The profession has become obsessed with quantity rather than quality. [ ... ] One brilliant article should outweigh one mediocre book.
Camille Paglia
#66. Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys.
Camille Paglia
#67. Perhaps there is no greater issue facing contemporary women than the choices they must make about balancing home and work.
Camille Paglia
#68. A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.
Camille Paglia
#69. 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
#70. Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones
Camille Paglia
#71. When it defines man as the enemy, feminism is alienating women from their own bodies.
Camille Paglia
#72. I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of the Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become authoritarian totems of the Fifties ... Thirty years later, we're still stuck with the ["nice" girl].
Camille Paglia
#73. My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.
Camille Paglia
#74. 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
#75. The true mission of feminism today is not to carp about the woes of affluent Western career women but to turn the spotlight on life-and-death issues affecting women in the Third World, particularly in rural areas where they have little protection against exploitation and injustice.
Camille Paglia
#76. Love for all means coldness to something or someone. Even Jesus, let us recall, was unnecessarily rude to his mother at Cana.
Camille Paglia
#77. The moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate - which is why Mitt Romney's political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave.
Camille Paglia
#78. 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
#79. Madonna's great instinctive intelligence was evident to me from her earliest videos.
Camille Paglia
#80. It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.
Camille Paglia
#81. The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair.
Camille Paglia
#82. If someone offends you by speech, you must learn to defend yourself by speech.
Camille Paglia
#83. I've always felt that the obligation of teachers is to have a huge, broad overview and to provide a foundation course to the students. The long view of history is absolutely crucial.
Camille Paglia
#84. 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
#85. Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.
Camille Paglia
#86. If people could see the inside of my brain, I would be in prison.
Camille Paglia
#87. What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [ ... ] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.
Camille Paglia
#88. I remember turning 'The Sopranos' on once and within two minutes nearly throwing a brick through the screen.
Camille Paglia
#89. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force. Nature has a master agenda we can only dimly know.
Camille Paglia
#90. This was a good example of the fascist policing of public discourse in this country by nominal liberals who have become as unthinkingly wedded to dogma as any junior member of the Spanish Inquisition.
Camille Paglia
#91. I realize now how lucky I was, in the total absence of role models, to have only men to rebel against. Today's women students are meeting their oppressors in dangerously seductive new form, as successful congenial female professors who view themselves as victims of a rigid foreign ideology.
Camille Paglia
#92. 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
#93. As a registered Democrat, I am praying for a credible presidential candidate to emerge from the younger tier of politicians in their late 40s. A governor with executive experience would be ideal.
Camille Paglia
#94. 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
#95. The real butches are straight ... dealing with and controlling men makes you stronger.
Camille Paglia
#96. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men's relationships with women.
Camille Paglia
#97. Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.
Camille Paglia
#98. I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
Camille Paglia
#99. Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him.
Camille Paglia
#100. 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
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