Top 250 Camille Paglia Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

107. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

116. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

118. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

120. “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

121. “Your life is a Fellini film, lacking only Anita Ekberg with a cat on her head.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

124. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

127. “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

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 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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

145. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

147. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

149. “Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.”

— Camille Paglia

150. “When it defines man as the enemy, feminism is alienating women from their own bodies.”

— Camille Paglia