Top 250 Camille Paglia Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.”

— Camille Paglia

202. “Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.”

— Camille Paglia

203. “It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.”

— Camille Paglia

204. “Western man represents himself, on the political or psychological stage, in a spectacular world-theater. Our personality is innately cinematic, light-charged projections flickering on the screen of Western consciousness.”

— Camille Paglia

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Camille Paglia

208. “Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.”

— Camille Paglia

209. “American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.”

— Camille Paglia

210. “It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal.”

— Camille Paglia

211. “I’m for a high libido president! I applaud him if he gets up and picks up women.”

— Camille Paglia

212. “All great stars are competitive. That’s a sign of a true artist – if you don’t have the fire of competition deep down inside, you’re never going to achieve anything. You have to want to be king of the heap.”

— Camille Paglia

213. “Nature, I have constantly argued in my work, is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is the ultimate disposer of human fate, randomly recarving geography over 10,000-year epochs.”

— Camille Paglia

214. “When anything goes, it’s women who lose.”

— Camille Paglia

215. “Every month, it is woman’s fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.”

— Camille Paglia

216. “Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.”

— Camille Paglia

217. “Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.”

— Camille Paglia

218. “Because I’m criticizing liberalism, people automatically call me a conservative. This is madness! The idea that somehow one cannot critique liberalism from the left, from the left wing of liberalism. I mean, how can people be so stupid?”

— Camille Paglia

219. “The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.”

— Camille Paglia

220. “Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.”

— Camille Paglia

221. “Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things, which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau.”

— Camille Paglia

222. “Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son.”

— Camille Paglia

223. “Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of tuning in and impatiently tuning out. As a longtime fan of talk radio, I don’t think this bodes well for the long-term broad appeal of the medium.”

— Camille Paglia

224. “A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.”

— Camille Paglia

225. “Love for all means coldness to something or someone. Even Jesus, let us recall, was unnecessarily rude to his mother at Cana.”

— Camille Paglia

226. “I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don’t do things like that anymore – tracking words down to their roots.”

— Camille Paglia

227. “Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him.”

— Camille Paglia

228. “My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.”

— Camille Paglia

229. “It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman.”

— Camille Paglia

230. “America is still a frontier country of wide open spaces. Our closeness to nature is one reason why our problem is not repression but regression; our notorious violence is the constant eruption of primi-tiveness, of anarchic individualism.”

— Camille Paglia

231. “The only way to teach focus is to present the eye with opportunities for steady perception – best supplied by the contemplation of art. Looking at art requires stillness and receptivity, which realign our senses and produce a magical tranquillity.”

— Camille Paglia

232. “Madonna’s great instinctive intelligence was evident to me from her earliest videos.”

— Camille Paglia

233. “Effeminate men have suffered a bad press the world over.”

— Camille Paglia

234. “If people could see the inside of my brain, I would be in prison.”

— Camille Paglia

235. “Male urination is a form of commentary.”

— Camille Paglia

236. “Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, and now there is struggle. Dim memories of life before the traumatic separation of birth may be the source of Arcadian fantasies of a lost golden age.”

— Camille Paglia

237. “Consciousness is a pitiful hostage of its flesh-envelope, whose surges, circuits, and secret murmurings it cannot stay or speed. This is the chthonian drama that has no climax but only an enedless round, cycle upon cycle. Microcosm mirrors macrocosm. Free will is stillborn in the red cells of our body, for there is no free will in nature. Our choices come to us prepackaged and special delivery, molded by hands not our own.”

— Camille Paglia

238. “The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man’s cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God’s enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God’s true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.”

— Camille Paglia

239. “Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son.”

— Camille Paglia

240. “I believe that everybody has the right to view his or her own body as a palette. However, I think intellectuals should at least try to be role models.”

— Camille Paglia

241. “I realize now how lucky I was, in the total absence of role models, to have only men to rebel against. Today’s women students are meeting their oppressors in dangerously seductive new form, as successful congenial female professors who view themselves as victims of a rigid foreign ideology.”

— Camille Paglia

242. “Every revolution eventually needs a new revolution.”

— Camille Paglia

243. “In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace.”

— Camille Paglia

244. “We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force. Nature has a master agenda we can only dimly know.”

— Camille Paglia

245. “If feminism has receded in visibility and prestige, it is precisely because its vision of life’s goals and rewards has become too narrow and elitist.”

— Camille Paglia

246. “Madonna can still produce a catchy pop song, but she hasn’t expanded her artistic vocabulary since the 1990s. Her concerts are glitzy extravaganzas of special effects overkill. She leaves little space in them for emotional depth or unscripted rapport with the audience.”

— Camille Paglia

247. “I am a registered Democrat who is determined to return my party to the proletarian principles of the Franklin D. Roosevelt era.”

— Camille Paglia

248. “To whom does he owe ultimate re- sponsibility? Since Romanticism, we have expected the artist not to celebrate God, king, family, and established values but to break taboos, to explore his or her deepest, most socially forbidden self.”

— Camille Paglia

249. “I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions – which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.”

— Camille Paglia

250. “If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis.”

— Camille Paglia