Top 250 Camille Paglia Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “When I meet gay men anywhere in the world, there is a spontaneity and a spirit of fun and mischief that lesbians seem incapable of.”

— Camille Paglia

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Children are monsters of unbridled egotism and will, for they spring directly from nature, hostile intimations of immorality.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

56. “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

57. “Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It’s part of the sizzle.”

— Camille Paglia

58. “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

59. “Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight.”

— Camille Paglia

60. “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

61. “What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization, but an internation conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men’s own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.”

— Camille Paglia

62. “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

63. “Old school feminism, coveting social power, is blind to woman’s cosmic sexual power.”

— Camille Paglia

64. “What is pretty in nature is confined to the thin skin of the globe upon which we huddle. Scratch that skin, and nature’s daemonic ugliness will erupt.”

— Camille Paglia

65. “The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.”

— Camille Paglia

66. “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

67. “Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork.”

— Camille Paglia

68. “The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.”

— Camille Paglia

69. “Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind.”

— Camille Paglia

70. “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

71. “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

72. “Mind is a captive of the body.”

— Camille Paglia

73. “The moment there is imagination there is myth.”

— Camille Paglia

74. “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

75. “Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.”

— Camille Paglia

76. “I view each world religion, including Judeo-Christianity and Islam, as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe. Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West’s foundational texts, is a dangerously waning among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics, all perspective is lost.”

— Camille Paglia

77. “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

78. “I am a very reclusive, private person.”

— Camille Paglia

79. “Sotomayor’s vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as ‘a wise Latina’ trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment – a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism.”

— Camille Paglia

80. “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

81. “They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.”

— Camille Paglia

82. “It’s so tiring to make love to women, it takes forever. I’m too lazy to be a lesbian.”

— Camille Paglia

83. “Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion!”

— Camille Paglia

84. “Ballet is the body rising. Ballet is ceremonial and hieratic. Its disdain for the commonplace material world is the source of its authority and glamour.”

— Camille Paglia

85. “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.”

— Camille Paglia

86. “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

87. “The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.”

— Camille Paglia

88. “How many modern transsexuals are unacknowledged shamans? Perhaps it is to poets they should go for counsel, rather than surgeons.”

— Camille Paglia

89. “Working moms commonly testify that they feel guilty when they are away from their children and guilty when they are not at their jobs. Devoted fathers certainly miss their children deeply, but it does not seem to be with the same gnawing, primal anxiety that often afflicts women.”

— Camille Paglia

90. “The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms.”

— Camille Paglia

91. “Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.”

— Camille Paglia

92. “The smouldering eroticism of great European actresses like Jeanne Moreau demonstrated to my generations women’s archetypal mystery and glamour, completely missing from the totalitarian world-view of the misogynist Foucault. For me, the big French D is not Derrida, but Deneuve.”

— Camille Paglia

93. “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.”

— Camille Paglia

94. “Liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother.”

— Camille Paglia

95. “We must accept our pain Change what we can and laugh at the rest.”

— Camille Paglia

96. “The most successful prostitutes are invisible, because the sign of a prostitute’s success is her absolute blending with the environment. She’s so shrewd, she never becomes visible. She never gets in trouble. She has command of her life, and her clients.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

98. “Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.”

— Camille Paglia

99. “Human beings are not nature’s favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.”

— Camille Paglia

100. “The Dionysian is no picnic.”

— Camille Paglia