Top 250 Camille Paglia Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

153. “All roads from Rousseau lead to Sade.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

155. “My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself We need more dissent and less dogma.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

157. “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

158. “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

159. “One of the most startling discoveries of my career was when I realized that the strongest women in the world are not lesbians but heterosexual women, who know how to handle men.”

— Camille Paglia

160. “When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde.”

— Camille Paglia

161. “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

162. “There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders.”

— Camille Paglia

163. “Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

165. “In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education.”

— Camille Paglia

166. “When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble.”

— Camille Paglia

167. “Very gifted people may be sociopathic in varying degrees.”

— Camille Paglia

168. “Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman’s sexuality.”

— Camille Paglia

169. “Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.”

— Camille Paglia

170. “Woman’s sexuality is disruptive of the dully mechanical workaday world, in which efficiency means uniformity. The problems of woman’s entrance into the career system spring from more than male chauvinism. She brings nature into the social realm, which may be too small to contain it.”

— Camille Paglia

171. “Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity.”

— Camille Paglia

172. “Although I’m an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised.”

— Camille Paglia

173. “Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands.”

— Camille Paglia

174. “This was a good example of the fascist policing of public discourse in this country by nominal liberals who have become as unthinkingly wedded to dogma as any junior member of the Spanish Inquisition.”

— Camille Paglia

175. “Capitalism is an art form.”

— Camille Paglia

176. “Not since the Black Panthers sailed into their Upper East Side tea party has there been so daffy an exercise in radical chic.”

— Camille Paglia

177. “Computer enhancement has spread to still photography in advertisements, fashion pictorials, and magazine covers, where the human figure and face are subtly elongated or remodeled at will. Caricature is our ruling mode.”

— Camille Paglia

178. “Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin.”

— Camille Paglia

179. “My problem is that I do not get along with lesbians at all. They don’t like me, and I don’t like them.”

— Camille Paglia

180. “There are no female geniuses because there are no female Jack-the-Rippers.”

— Camille Paglia

181. “Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.”

— Camille Paglia

182. “Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?”

— Camille Paglia

183. “Younger women have no problem in reconciling beauty with ambitions as a professional woman.”

— Camille Paglia

184. “Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.”

— Camille Paglia

185. “Love is imploring humanity: Set down your burden of doubt; in perfect faith there is neither fear nor struggle.”

— Camille Paglia

186. “A war still rages over the legacy of the 1960s.”

— Camille Paglia

187. “The so-called miracle of birth is nature getting her own way.”

— Camille Paglia

188. “Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt.”

— Camille Paglia

189. “Literature and art are never created for scholars but for a universal audience. If academics cannot see that audience, the cannot see art.”

— Camille Paglia

190. “There is such a thing as seduction, and it needs encouragement rather than discouragement in our puritanical Anglo-American world.”

— Camille Paglia

191. “When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.”

— Camille Paglia

192. “I guess I’m just a natural warrior.”

— Camille Paglia

193. “What was distinctive in those emancipated women – and here loom my later problems with second-wave feminism – was that they never indulged in reflex male-bashing: they accepted and admired the enormity of what men had accomplished and were simply demanding a fair chance to prove that women could match or surpass it.”

— Camille Paglia

194. “Last time I checked, there were no Americans at all in Renaissance art.”

— Camille Paglia

195. “All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics and politics were invented by men. But by the Promethean law of conflict and capture, woman has a right to seize what she will and vie with man on her own terms.”

— Camille Paglia

196. “The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they’re dead is the nasty things I’ve said about them.”

— Camille Paglia

197. “Overconcentration on any one point is distortion.”

— Camille Paglia

198. “Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was sill scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard !”

— Camille Paglia

199. “Perhaps there is no greater issue facing contemporary women than the choices they must make about balancing home and work.”

— Camille Paglia

200. “Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another.”

— Camille Paglia