Camille Paglia Quotes

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

Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power.

If you read only the New York Times- I said, 'Oh my God!' The readers of the New York Times are heading for a major, major breakdown shock if Trump is in fact elected.

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

The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it.

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

Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.

Very gifted people may be sociopathic in varying degrees.

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

[T]he most viciously intolerant campus I ever visited as a lecturer was Brown, where the humanities program has been gutted by a jejune brand of feminist theory and cultural and media studies.

Effeminate men have suffered a bad press the world over.

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

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.

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

Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.

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

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

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

The post-war "publish or perish" tyranny must end. The profession has become obsessed with quantity rather than quality. [...] One brilliant article should outweigh one mediocre book.

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

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.

Popular culture - above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R & B roots - did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader.

A war still rages over the legacy of the 1960s.

All men even, I have written, Jesus Christ began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes.

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

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

[On U.S. universities:] The bland leading the bland.

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

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

A society that forgets about art risks loslng its soul.

Social justice and compassion are compatible with an intelligent respect for private enterprise and law and order.

My anti-liberal position should not be mistaken for conservatism.

How many modern transsexuals are unacknowledged shamans? Perhaps it is to poets they should go for counsel, rather than surgeons.

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

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

The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.

Foucault is the Cagliostro of our time.

Feminism is dead. The movement is absolutely dead. The women's movement tried to suppress dissident voices for way too long. There's no room for dissent.

Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature.

The real butches are straight ... dealing with and controlling men makes you stronger.

For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to women's cosmic power.

Academic Marxism is a fantasy world, and unctuous compassion-sweepstakes, into which real workers or peasants never penetrate.

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

The plastic surgery issue is really looming because girls in the U.S. are getting it in their teens.

The piddling ignoramuses who deny that there is a distinct, discernible, objective western tradition are just woozy literati.

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

Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.

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.

Everyone of my generation who preached free love is responsible for AIDS.

Imperialism and slavery are no white male monopoly, but are everywhere from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia to India, China and Japan.