Camille Paglia Quotes

Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.

Greek pederasty honored the erotic magnetism of male adolescence in a way that today brings police to the door. Children are more conscious and perverse than parents like to think.

Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.

Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents.

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

Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men's tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity.

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

What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

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

Children are monsters of unbridled egotism and will, for they spring directly from nature, hostile intimations of immorality.

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.

Modernization means Westernization.

The unhappy truth is that male homosexuality will never be fully accepted by the heterosexual majority, who are obeying the dictates not of bigoted society or religion but of procreative nature.

We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives.

Even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.

Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.

It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.

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.

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

Capitalism is an art form.

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.

I guess I'm just a natural warrior.

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

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.

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.

Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt.

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

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

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.

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

All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.

Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.

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.

Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman.

The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms.

Every revolution eventually needs a new revolution.

Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion! What feminism does not need, it seems to me, is an endless recycling of Doris Day Fifties clichés about noble womanhood.

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

Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality.

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

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.

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

American high schools have physically imprisoned young people, stripped them of civil liberties and fed them a diet of p.c. pap.

Anyone who gets his or her political news primarily from the New York Times (which made the ethically challenged carpetbagger Hillary a senator) is a fool.

What is pretty in nature is confined to the thin skin of the globe upon which we huddle. Scratch that skin, and nature's daemonic ugliness will erupt.

Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.