Top 250 Camille Paglia Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

160. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

166. “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

167. “Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects government to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother.”

— Camille Paglia

168. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

170. “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

171. “Capitalism is an art form.”

— Camille Paglia

172. “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

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. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

176. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

178. “Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt.”

— Camille Paglia

179. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

190. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

192. “Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaver-like tunneling to the top.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

195. “My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren’t created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.”

— Camille Paglia

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

— Camille Paglia

197. “Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends.”

— Camille Paglia

198. “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

199. “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

200. “Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women.”

— Camille Paglia