Top 250 Camille Paglia Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

63. “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

64. “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

65. “Mind is a captive of the body.”

— Camille Paglia

66. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

69. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

86. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

89. “Gloria Steinem’s marriage is proof positive of the emotional desperation of ageing feminists who for over 30 years worshiped the steely career woman and callously trashed stay-at-home moms.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

91. “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

92. “The Dionysian is no picnic.”

— Camille Paglia

93. “Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees.”

— Camille Paglia

94. “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

95. “I see far stronger and more charismatic personalities strolling around Philadelphia’s neighborhoods than are being featured in most of today’s bland daytime soaps.”

— Camille Paglia

96. “Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.”

— Camille Paglia

97. “Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism – clarity, order, proportion, balance – is in Egypt.”

— Camille Paglia

98. “American feminism has a man problem. The beaming Betty Crockers, hangdog dowdies, and parochial prudes who call themselves feminists want men to be like women. They fear and despise the masculine. The academic feminists think their nerdy bookworm husbands are the ideal model of human manhood. But.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

100. “I am waiting impatiently for the day when beleaguered, like-minded academics can order James Wolcott’s collected essays for their classes.”

— Camille Paglia