Top 250 Camille Paglia Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Modernization means Westernization.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

3. “A woman simply is, but a man must become.”

— Camille Paglia

4. “The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.”

— Camille Paglia

5. “The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.”

— Camille Paglia

6. “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 you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.”

— Camille Paglia

7. “What troubles me about the “hostile workplace” category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women.”

— Camille Paglia

8. “The Devil is a woman.”

— Camille Paglia

9. “Teaching is a performance art.”

— Camille Paglia

10. “Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

13. “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

14. “Promiscuity in men may cheapen love but sharpen thought. Promiscuity in women is illness, a leakage of identity.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Heterosexual love,. is in sync with cosmic forces. Not everyone has the stomach for daily war with nature.”

— Camille Paglia

19. “Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.”

— Camille Paglia

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.”

— Camille Paglia

23. “Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.”

— Camille Paglia

24. “My anti-liberal position should not be mistaken for conservatism...”

— Camille Paglia

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Men knew that if they devirginized a woman, they could end up dead within twenty-four hours. These controls have been removed.”

— Camille Paglia

29. “Women’s studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink. It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women.”

— Camille Paglia

30. “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

31. “Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!”

— Camille Paglia

32. “Even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.”

— Camille Paglia

33. “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

34. “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

35. “The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it.”

— Camille Paglia

36. “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

37. “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.”

— Camille Paglia

38. “If someone offends you by speech, you must learn to defend yourself by speech.”

— Camille Paglia

39. “Foucault is the Cagliostro of our time.”

— Camille Paglia

40. “Social justice and compassion are compatible with an intelligent respect for private enterprise and law and order.”

— Camille Paglia

41. “A society that forgets about art risks loslng its soul.”

— Camille Paglia

42. “Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.”

— Camille Paglia

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature’s power.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

48. “Hollywood, America’s greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind.”

— Camille Paglia

49. “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

50. “The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.”

— Camille Paglia