110+ Camille Paglia Quotes On Education, Religion And Art

Camille Paglia is an American author, social critic, and feminist. She is known for her provocative views on gender, sexuality, and culture. She has written several books, including Sexual Personae, Vamps & Tramps, and Glittering Images. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Camille Paglia on love, education, life.

Top 10 Camille Paglia Quotes

1. History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence.
2. The moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate - which is why Mitt Romney's political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave.
3. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
4. Promiscuity in men may cheapen love but sharpen thought. Promiscuity in women is illness, a leakage of identity.
5. Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.
6. If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them.
7. The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair.
8. Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.
9. Teaching is a performance art.
10. The airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan - it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.

Camille Paglia Short Quotes

• Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion!
• The Dionysian is no picnic.
• When anything goes, it's women who lose.
• The moment there is imagination there is myth
• Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.
• The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms.
• The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.
• Women will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality.
• Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.
• Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest.

Camille Paglia Quotes About Love

Heterosexual love,. is in sync with cosmic forces. Not everyone has the stomach for daily war with nature. — Camille Paglia

It's so tiring to make love to women, it takes forever. I'm too lazy to be a lesbian. — Camille Paglia

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

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

Camille Paglia Quotes About Education

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence. — Camille Paglia

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

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. — Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes About Life

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

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

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

The most successful prostitutes are invisible, because the sign of a prostitute's success is her absolute blending with the environment. She's so shrewd, she never becomes visible. She never gets in trouble. She has command of her life, and her clients. — Camille Paglia

Judeo-Christians have got to respect the pagan truth shown in the popular culture of sex and violence. It's meaningful about the elemental forces of life, the brutality of life and nature. — Camille Paglia

Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements. — Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes About Religion

Straight men who visit prostitutes are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family--in other words, from society, religion, and procreative Mother Nature. — Camille Paglia

Hollywood, America's greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind. — Camille Paglia

When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes About Art

Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct. — Camille Paglia

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

Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due. — Camille Paglia

We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de si?cle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way. — Camille Paglia

Capitalism is an art form. — Camille Paglia

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion. — Camille Paglia

A society that forgets about art risks loslng its soul. — Camille Paglia

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

Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight. — Camille Paglia

Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the "best" American higher criticism. — Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes About Feminism

Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men's relationships with women. — Camille Paglia

Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives. — Camille Paglia

Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses. — Camille Paglia

What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization , an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women. — Camille Paglia

Women are not in control of their bodies; nature is. Ancient mythology, with its sinister archetypes of vampire and Gorgon, is more accurate than feminism about the power and terror of female sexuality. — Camille Paglia

Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its puerile, paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex. — Camille Paglia

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

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. — Camille Paglia

American feminism's nose dive began when Kate Millet, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies. — Camille Paglia

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

Camille Paglia Quotes About Obama

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

Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo. — Camille Paglia

Obama's folksy come-on is as bad as Madonna's faux British - and both are in need of fresh inspiration. — Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes About Elite

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

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions? — Camille Paglia

The venerable emeritus professors still at Yale when I entered graduate school [in the 1960s] may have been reserved, puritanical WASPs, but they were men of honor who had given their lives to scholarship. Today in the elite schools, honor and ethics are gone. — Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Famous Quotes And Sayings

The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens. — Camille Paglia

The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images. — Camille Paglia

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

Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters. — Camille Paglia

Prostitution is not just a service industry, mopping up the overflow of male demand, which always exceeds female supply. Prostitution testifies to the amoral power struggle of sex, which religion has never been able to stop. Prostitutes, pornographers, and their patrons are marauders in the forest of archaic night. — Camille Paglia

Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept. — Camille Paglia

Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus, a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed. — Camille Paglia

We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end. — Camille Paglia

Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their ''evil'' look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it — Camille Paglia

There's something retro about your persona. It's like the pre-World War II generation of reporters - those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they've all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds - utterly dull and insipid. — Camille Paglia

Bisexuality is our best hope of escape from the animosities and false polarities of the current sex wars. — Camille Paglia

The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture — Camille Paglia

Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature. — Camille Paglia

I regard affirmative action as pernicious - a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women. — Camille Paglia

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

Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated. — Camille Paglia

The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force. — Camille Paglia

What troubles me about the "hostile workplace" category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women. — Camille Paglia

The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again. — Camille Paglia

Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer. — Camille Paglia

We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible. — Camille Paglia

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

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

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

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. — Camille Paglia

Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improviser. His parables are great one-liners. — Camille Paglia

What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization, but an internation conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work. — Camille Paglia

Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all. — Camille Paglia

Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges. — Camille Paglia

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

I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man’s greatest idea. Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hard-core gay activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imagination to educate the young. … Until the left comes to its senses about the cultural power of religion, the right will continue to broaden its appeal. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity. — Camille Paglia

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

There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around. Even the bomb merely releases energy that nature has put there. Nuclear war would be just a spark in the grandeur of space. Nor can radiation alter nature: she will absorb it all. After the bomb, nature will pick up the cards we have spilled, shuffle them, and begin her game again. — Camille Paglia

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

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

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

[W]earisome as it may seem, women must realize that, in making a commitment to a man, they have merged in his unconscious with his mother and have therefore inherited the ambivalence of that relationship. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm-as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy. — Camille Paglia

Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction. — Camille Paglia

In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

Much violence against women originates in emotional territory that they already command. By midlife and early old age, as the hormones of both genders change, women are in total, despotic control of their marriages. — Camille Paglia

I view the prostitute as one of the few women who is totally in control of her fate, totally in control of the realm of sex. The lesbian feminists tried to take control of female sexuality away from men - but the prostitute was doing that all along. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. 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

Modernization means Westernization. — Camille Paglia

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

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

If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct -- unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where women clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers. — Camille Paglia

In the real world, very smart people fail and mediocre people rise. Part of what makes people fail or succeed are skills that have nothing to do with IQ. Also, the idea that intelligence can be gauged by an IQ test is erroneous. — Camille Paglia

Sex IS power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. — Camille Paglia

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

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. — Camille Paglia

The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood. — Camille Paglia

Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity's ancient campaign against pagan nature. — Camille Paglia

The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.' — Camille Paglia

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

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

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

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

Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality. — Camille Paglia

Life Lessons by Camille Paglia

1. Camille Paglia's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the interplay between culture, history, and gender identity.
2. She encourages readers to think critically about the power dynamics of society and to challenge the status quo.
3. Paglia's work highlights the importance of examining the past in order to understand the present and to create a better future.