Top 250 Camille Paglia Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Your life is a Fellini film, lacking only Anita Ekberg with a cat on her head.”

— Camille Paglia

102. “The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force.”

— Camille Paglia

103. “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.”

— Camille Paglia

104. “I’m a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I’m an evangelist of popular culture, but when there’s only media, then there’s going to be a slow debasement of language, and that’s what I think we’re fighting.”

— Camille Paglia

105. “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

106. “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

107. “We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence.”

— Camille Paglia

108. “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

109. “Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.”

— Camille Paglia

110. “It’s patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.”

— Camille Paglia

111. “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

112. “Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

114. “Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.”

— Camille Paglia

115. “I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society’s care.”

— Camille Paglia

116. “The stigma of the prostitute is the badge of her identity. That is why the client goes to her. If he wanted someone without a stigma, he’d go and screw the lady next door.”

— Camille Paglia

117. “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

118. “I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I’m sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.”

— Camille Paglia

119. “When I was a child, my father taught me to put up my fists like a boy and to be prepared to defend myself at all times.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

121. “Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.”

— Camille Paglia

122. “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.”

— Camille Paglia

123. “Lesbian feminists, for all their ideals of sisterhood and solidarity, can treat each other with a fickleness, a parasitic exploitativeness, and vicious spite that have to be seen to be believed.”

— Camille Paglia

124. “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

125. “The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.”

— Camille Paglia

126. “I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”

— Camille Paglia

127. “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.”

— Camille Paglia

128. “And I found in my study that history is cyclic, and everywhere in the world you find this pattern in ancient times: that as a culture begins to decline, you have an efflorescence of transgender phenomena. That is a symptom of cultural collapse.”

— Camille Paglia

129. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

131. “Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.”

— Camille Paglia

132. “I sometimes call my new system ‘Italian pagan Catholicism,’ but it could more accurately be called ‘pragmatic liberalism,’ with roots in Enlightenment political philosophy. It is a synthesis of the enduring dual elements in our culture, pagan and Judeo-Christian, Romantic and Classic.”

— Camille Paglia

133. “Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest.”

— Camille Paglia

134. “Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.”

— Camille Paglia

135. “We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism.”

— Camille Paglia

136. “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

137. “Every man harbors an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free.”

— Camille Paglia

138. “I hate dogma in any form. I hated it in the Catholic Church and Girl Scout troops of the 1950s, and I hate in in gay activism and established feminism today.”

— Camille Paglia

139. “I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.”

— Camille Paglia

140. “Science is a method of logical analysis of nature’s operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature’s forces, and their frequent predictability.”

— Camille Paglia

141. “Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents.”

— Camille Paglia

142. “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

143. “Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

145. “There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.”

— Camille Paglia

146. “For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to women’s cosmic power.”

— Camille Paglia

147. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

149. “Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.”

— Camille Paglia

150. “At some level, all love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts.”

— Camille Paglia