Camille Paglia famous quotes

Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!
-- Camille Paglia

#Art #Creativity

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

#Careers #Issues #Life And Death

Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.
-- Camille Paglia

#Dog #Sex #Vacation

The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they're dead is the nasty things I've said about them.
-- Camille Paglia

#Enemy #Nasty #Said

We must accept our pain Change what we can and laugh at the rest
-- Camille Paglia

#Pain #Laughing #Accepting

Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.
-- Camille Paglia

#Creative #Criticism #Spirit

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

#Mother #Running #Teenage

High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces.
-- Camille Paglia

#Struggle #Fire #Lovely

Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.
-- Camille Paglia

#Sports #Art #Nature

Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.
-- Camille Paglia

#Feminism #Pills #Birth Control

I believe that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly due to their Seventies delusions that a world without women was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally tore the body apart.
-- Camille Paglia

#Believe #Gay #Men

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

#Space #Advice #Mind

The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture
-- Camille Paglia

#Nature #Men #Feminist

Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones
-- Camille Paglia

#Heart #Maturity #League

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

#Self #Mental Health #Mental Illness

The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.
-- Camille Paglia

#Love #Art #Self

Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents.
-- Camille Paglia

#Religious #Anti Religious #Hallmark

Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.
-- Camille Paglia

#Sex #Fall #Men

When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble.
-- Camille Paglia

#Brother #Feminist #Trouble

My problem is that I do not get along with lesbians at all. They don't like me, and I don't like them.
-- Camille Paglia

#Problem

They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.
-- Camille Paglia

#Civilization #Savages #Fragility

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

#School #Men #Yale

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman's attention.
-- Camille Paglia

#Sex #Men #Attention

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

#World #Weakness #Aristocracy

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

#New York #Political #News

The best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art. The Nude is a beautifully written work of sophisticated connoisseurship that analyzes art in its own terms rather than imposing strident, politicized categories on it. It outlines the major body types, male and female, in Western art and, via a wealth of illustrations, trains the reader's eye to detect and evaluate proportion. This book reveres art
-- Camille Paglia

#Art #Book #Eye

Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion!
-- Camille Paglia

#Kindness #Compassion #Syrup

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

#Gay #Men #Coal

[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

#Mother #Commitment #May

The real butches are straight ... dealing with and controlling men makes you stronger.
-- Camille Paglia

#Real #Men #Stronger

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

#Men #Civilization #Feminism

Academic Marxism is a fantasy world, and unctuous compassion-sweepstakes, into which real workers or peasants never penetrate.
-- Camille Paglia

#Real #Compassion #World

Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.
-- Camille Paglia

#Book #Writing #Sisterhood

Foucault is the Cagliostro of our time.
-- 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

#Historical #Ignorant #Judgment

Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.
-- Camille Paglia

#Self #Perfect #Personality

We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism.
-- Camille Paglia

#Violence #Cynicism #Barbarism

Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands.
-- Camille Paglia

#Philosophical #Thinking #Hands

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

#Mad #Consciousness #Adaptation

Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.
-- Camille Paglia

#Fate #Political #Feminism

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

#Unhappy #Majority #Males

Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs.
-- Camille Paglia

#Art #Nazi #Connoisseur

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

#Thinking #Yesterday #Errors

Women are not in control of their bodies; nature is. Ancient mythology, with its sinister archetypes of vampire and Gorgon, is more accurate than feminism about the power and terror of female sexuality.
-- Camille Paglia

#Vampire #Feminism #Female

Social justice and compassion are compatible with an intelligent respect for private enterprise and law and order.
-- Camille Paglia

#Intelligent #Compassion #Order

Sex at the age of 90 is like playing billiards with a rope
-- Camille Paglia

#Sex #Men #Age

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

#Art #Numbers #Ignorant

I regard affirmative action as pernicious-a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.
-- Camille Paglia

#Class #White #Benefits

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

#Army #College #Records

Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
-- Camille Paglia

#Abortion #Fit #Casual

It's so tiring to make love to women, it takes forever. I'm too lazy to be a lesbian.
-- Camille Paglia

#Forever #Making Love #Lazy

In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.
-- Camille Paglia

#Zero #Identity #Abnormal

Elizabeth Taylor is, in my opinion, the greatest actress in film history. She instinctively understands the camera and its nonverbal intimacies. Opening her violet eyes, she takes us into the liquid realm of emotion, which she inhabits by Pisces intuition. Richard Burton said that Taylor showed him how to act for the camera. Economy and understatement are essential. At her best, Elizabeth Taylor simply is. An electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens. It is an extra-sensory, pagan phenomenon.
-- Camille Paglia

#Eye #Space #Intuition

The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.'
-- Camille Paglia

#Struggle #Law #Identity

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

#Children #Pain #Men

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

#Taken #Fighting #Boys

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

#Real #Smart #Skills

No one is born gay. The idea is ridiculous, but it is symptomatic of our overpoliticized climate that such assertions are given instant credence by gay activists and their media partisans. I think what gay men are remembering is that they were born different.
-- Camille Paglia

#Gay #Men #Thinking

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

#Sex #Self #Pie

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

#Jesus #Comedian #Brilliant

I support, defend, and admire prostitutes, gay or straight. They do important and necessary work, whether moralists of the Left and Right like it or not. Feminists who think they can abolish the sex trade are in a state of massive delusion. Only a ruthless, fascist regime of vast scale could eradicate the rogue sex impulse that is indistinguishable from the life force. Simply in the Western world, pagan sexuality has survived 2000 years of Judaeo-Christian persecution and is hardly going to be defeated by a few feminists whacking at it with their brooms.
-- Camille Paglia

#Christian #Sex #Gay

America is still a frontier country of wide open spaces. Our closeness to nature is one reason why our problem is not repression but regression; our notorious violence is the constant eruption of primi-tiveness, of anarchic individualism.
-- Camille Paglia

#Country #America #Space

Liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother.
-- Camille Paglia

#Mother #Father #Government

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman.
-- Camille Paglia

#Independent #America #Politics

Homosexuality is not 'normal' On the contrary it is a challenge to the norm...Nature exists whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction...No one is born gay. The idea is ridiculous...homosexuality is an adaptation, not an inborn trait....
-- Camille Paglia

#Gay #Ideas #Challenges

[Sarah] Palin is solidifying her status as a bona fide American cultural heroine.
-- Camille Paglia

#Politics #Heroines #Palin

There's something retro about your persona. It's like the pre-World War II generation of reporters - those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they've all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds - utterly dull and insipid.
-- Camille Paglia

#War #Class #Ivy

American high schools have physically imprisoned young people, stripped them of civil liberties and fed them a diet of p.c. pap.
-- Camille Paglia

#School #People #Liberty

There you have it: an expensive higher education based on sloganeering, on pat, trite phrases that substitute moral posturing for political reasoning. It's elitism masquerading as egalitarianism.
-- Camille Paglia

#Egalitarianism #Political #Phrases

I feel genuinely sorry for those who are so blinded by narrow partisanship that they cannot appreciate Limbaugh's energy, intelligence and satiric skill. They live in a box with bags over their heads. Though he and I hardly agree on politics (I voted for Ralph Nader last year and may go Green again in 2004), I respect Limbaugh as a political analyst and deft rhetorician who is a master of the microphone and who knows how to engage and challenge a vast audience.
-- Camille Paglia

#Sorry #Years #Skills

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

#Philosophy #Responsibility #Government

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

#Country #Example #Politics

[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

#Media #Feminist #Humanity

Rush Limbaugh is a principled conservative, master broadcaster and stinging social critic who has won his mammoth following through his own energy, individualism and wit. His daily radio show is the one reliable place ordinary citizens can turn to for a different perspective in the blizzard of propaganda and disinformation from the Northeastern media establishment. History will show that Limbaugh was a major force over the past decade in waking this country up from its p.c. coma.
-- Camille Paglia

#Country #Past #Media

I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man’s greatest idea. Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hard-core gay activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imagination to educate the young. … Until the left comes to its senses about the cultural power of religion, the right will continue to broaden its appeal
-- Camille Paglia

#Religious #Believe #Gay

Heterosexual love,. is in sync with cosmic forces. Not everyone has the stomach for daily war with nature.
-- Camille Paglia

#War #Love Is #Sync

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

#Dogma #Artwork #Shock

I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.
-- Camille Paglia

#Art #Firsts #Appearance

Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.
-- Camille Paglia

#Mother #Heart #Son

Not a shred of evidence supports the existence of matriarchy anywhere in the world at any time. [...] The matriarchy hypothesis, revived by American feminism, continues to flourish outside the university
-- Camille Paglia

#Support #Feminism #World

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

#Cutting #College #Ice

The Devil is a woman.
-- Camille Paglia

#Devil

Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature.
-- Camille Paglia

#May #Reducing #Form

My stress on the truth in sexual stereotypes and on the biologic basis of sex differences is sure to cause controversy.
-- Camille Paglia

#Sex #Stress #Differences

One of the most startling discoveries of my career was when I realized that the strongest women in the world are not lesbians but heterosexual women, who know how to handle men.
-- Camille Paglia

#Men #Discovery #Careers

Far from poisoning the mind, ***** shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.
-- Camille Paglia

#Mind #Sexuality #Veneer

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

#Emotional #Age #Violence

All men even, I have written, Jesus Christ began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes.
-- Camille Paglia

#Mother #Jesus #Men

Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association.
-- Camille Paglia

#Teacher #Mediocrity #Association

The piddling ignoramuses who deny that there is a distinct, discernible, objective western tradition are just woozy literati.
-- Camille Paglia

#Tradition #Deny #Western

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

#Buddhism #Pockets #Followers

Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.
-- Camille Paglia

#Genius #Poetic

Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son.
-- Camille Paglia

#Mother #Son #Men

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

#Men #Feminism #Ancient

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

#Taken #Responsibility #Sexuality

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

#Exercise #Feminist #Feminism

The moment there is imagination there is myth
-- Camille Paglia

#Imagination #Moments #Myth

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

#Beautiful #Goddess #Zeus

In the Seventies, women runners, developing amenorrhea and calcium-related shin splints, were the first to realize that nature is hovering over us, ready to shut down our systems if our fetus-feeding fat reserve drops below a certain percentage of body weight. In other words, in nature's eyes we are nothing but milk sacs and fat deposits.
-- Camille Paglia

#Eye #Firsts #Milk

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

#Syllabus #Students #Study