Camille Paglia Quotes

347 Sourced Quotes

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
Judeo-Christians have got to respect the pagan truth shown in the popular culture of sex and violence. It's meaningful about the elemental forces of life, the brutality of life and nature.

Camille Paglia
I'm saying that men go from control by their mothers to control by their wives, and this is the horror men's lives. And feminism refuses to see this.

Camille Paglia
Butchery is not the point of vampirism. Sex - domination and submission - is.

Camille Paglia
There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders.

Camille Paglia
Imperialism and slavery are no white male monopoly, but are everywhere from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia to India, China and Japan.

Camille Paglia
I think it is one of the greatest pictures ever taken of a woman.

Camille Paglia
If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them.

Camille Paglia
Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey.

Camille Paglia
If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct — unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where women clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers.

Camille Paglia
The followers of Derrida are pathetic, snuffling in French pockets for bits of pieces of a deconstructive method already massively and coherently presented — and with a mature sense of the sacred — in Buddhism and Hinduism.

Camille Paglia
The unhappy truth is that male homosexuality will never be fully accepted by the heterosexual majority, who are obeying the dictates not of bigoted society or religion but of procreative nature.

Camille Paglia
Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.

Camille Paglia
Women have ironically enjoyed a greater symbolic, if not practical freedom. Thus it is that male and not female homosexuality has been harshly punished by law. A debater in Lucian declares, Far better that a women, in the madness of her lust, should usurp the nature of man, than that man's noble nature should be so degraded as to play the woman. Similarly today, lesbian interludes are a staple of heterosexual pornography. Ever since man emerged from the dominance of nature, masculinity has been the most fragile and problematic of psychic states.

Camille Paglia
The English language was created by poets, a five-hundred year enterprise of emotion and metaphor, the richest dialogue in world literature. French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisian intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.

Camille Paglia
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
Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.

Camille Paglia
In Romanticism, unlike the Renaissance, Amazons retain their power. Rousseau wants it both ways. Idolizing women is natural and right, a cosmic law. On the other hand, male recessiveness is blamed on female coercion. Either way, sadomasochistic dominance and submission are inherent in Rousseausism from the start.

Camille Paglia
Feminism, arguing from the milder women's view, completely misses the blood-lust in rape, the joy of violation and destruction.

Camille Paglia
What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization but an international conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.

Camille Paglia
[Feminism] is alienating women from their own bodies … because they don't understand that they have something that men want, okay? So they're encouraged to interpret all male lust as oppressive and victimizing and negative, instead of seeing that it is up to them to husband this flame. They have a flame, and it's enormously powerful…

Camille Paglia
The comedian has to get a laugh from the audience, just the way a prostitute has to get an orgasm from the client.

Camille Paglia
The gargantuan promiscuity of the Seventies gay male world was a pagan phenomenon, unequaled in scale since the Roman empire.

Camille Paglia
The [sexual harassment] situation has gotten so out of hand that, in 1993, in one of the first British cases, a plumber was fired for continuing to use the traditional term "ballcock" for the toilet flotation unit, instead of the new politically correct term, sanitized of sexual suggestiveness. This is insane. We are back to the Victorian era, when table legs had to be draped lest they put the thought of ladies' legs into someone's dirty mind.

Camille Paglia
The only problem I have with computers and television is that when all cultures on earth reach the stage we are at it will lead to a kind of homogenization.

Camille Paglia
Oil painting and color, said Michelangelo, are for women and the lazy. His sharp-edged Apollonian style is the only way to beat back mother nature.

Camille Paglia
The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.

Camille Paglia
The number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow expertise and theoretical sophistication (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought. … Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres.

Camille Paglia
Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the best American higher criticism.

Camille Paglia
Hollywood, America's greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind.

Camille Paglia