Camille Paglia Quotes (63 Quotes)


    Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.

    If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.

    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.

    Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.

    Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion.


    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.



    Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.

    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.

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

    Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo.

    The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair.

    Elizabeth Taylor is pre-feminist woman. This is the source of her continuing greatness and relevance. She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses women's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all men's relations with women.

    A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.

    The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.

    Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.


    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.

    Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.

    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.

    Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.

    We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de siFcle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way.

    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.

    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.

    There are no female geniuses because there are no female Jack-the-Rippers.

    Sex IS power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.

    There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around. Even the bomb merely releases energy that nature has put there. Nuclear war would be just a spark in the grandeur of space. Nor can radiation ''alter'' nature she will absorb it all. After the bomb, nature will pick up the cards we have spilled, shuffle them, and begin her game again.

    Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their ''evil'' look at such times is no human projection the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it.


    Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.

    Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality. Every pregnant woman has body and self taken over by a chthonian force beyond her control. In the welcome pregnancy, this is a happy sacrifice. But in the unwanted one, initiated by rape or misadventure, it is a horror. Such unfortunate women look directly into nature's heart of Darkness. For a fetus is a benign tumor, a vampire who steals in order to live. The so-called miracle of birth is nature getting her own way.

    Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

    History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence

    If you don't embrace the consensus, your career stops in its tracks. I had a woman call me from the literature department at Harvard. She said no one can speak out because if you do, you don't get the courses you want, the hours you want, you don't get graduate assistants. It's pathetic. It's authoritarian, a regime of terror. Anyone opposed has either left the university or is totally underground.

    Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

    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.

    It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.

    Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.

    Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

    And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the "mob" - a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

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

    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.

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

    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, beaverlike tunneling to the top.

    Prostitution is not just a service industry, mopping up the overflow of male demand, which always exceeds female supply. Prostitution testifies to the amoral power struggle of sex, which religion has never been able to stop. Prostitutes, pornographers, and their patrons are marauders in the forest of archaic night.


    More Camille Paglia Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Woman - Man - Sex - Art - Nature - Feminism - Beauty - Custom & Convention - Science - Power - Parties - Education - Identity - History - America - Academic - Work & Career - Value - Envy & Jealousy - View All Camille Paglia Quotations

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    Napolean Hill - H. G. Wells - Upton Sinclair - Nicholas Sparks - Lu Xun - Lin Yutang - Ken Follett - Joseph Campbell - Jane Roberts - Frederick Forsyth


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