Top 410 Quotes & Sayings by Camille Paglia

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Camille Paglia.

Last updated on September 16, 2024.

Camille Anna Paglia is an American feminist academic and social critic. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She is critical of many aspects of modern culture and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) and other books. She is also a critic of contemporary American feminism and of post-structuralism, as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.

American - Author | Born: April 2, 1947

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

Camille Paglia

When anything goes, it's women who lose.

Camille Paglia

Leftism should be about the people. That's how it began.

Camille Paglia

It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.

Camille Paglia

There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

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

Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.

Camille Paglia

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

Camille Paglia

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

Camille Paglia

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

Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.

Camille Paglia

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

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

Camille Paglia

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

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

I remember turning 'The Sopranos' on once and within two minutes nearly throwing a brick through the screen.

Camille Paglia

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

Camille Paglia

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

Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women.

Camille Paglia

I've been a longtime admirer of Condoleezza Rice, because I like her articulateness and style - her toughness and rigor.

Camille Paglia

The reason I was angry all the time was that Gloria Steinem and all those people, without reading my work, were saying all these horrible things against me.

Camille Paglia

Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.

Camille Paglia

Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents.

Camille Paglia

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Camille Paglia

If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.

Camille Paglia

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

Camille Paglia

Christianity began as a religion of the poor and dispossessed - farmers, fishermen, Bedouin shepherds. There's a great lure to that kind of simplicity and rigor - the discipline, the call to action.

Camille Paglia

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.

Camille Paglia

As a longtime fan of talk radio, I'm very worried about the low opinion that conservative hosts and callers have of the American artist. Art is portrayed as a scam, a rip-off and snow job pushed by snobbish elites.

Camille Paglia

Ever since Romanticism, an oppositional mode, artists have the right, and indeed the duty, to attack social convention. But it is ridiculous and in fact self-infantilizing for them to expect to be financially supported by the general public whom they are insulting.

Camille Paglia

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

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.

Camille Paglia

Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.

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

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

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!

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

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

Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.

Camille Paglia

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

The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.

Camille Paglia

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.

Camille Paglia

A woman simply is, but a man must become.

Camille Paglia

I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care.

Camille Paglia

High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces.

Camille Paglia

Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.

Camille Paglia

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.

Camille Paglia

Video games and YouTube.com are creatively booming, even though Web design, as demonstrated by the ugly clutter of most major news sites, is in the pits.

Camille Paglia

Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!

Camille Paglia

Because of my own family's service (in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Massachusetts and New York National Guard), I am a strong supporter of the military and do believe that there are just wars.

Camille Paglia

Now that virtually every career is an option for ambitious girls, it can no longer be considered regressive or reactionary to reintroduce discussion of marriage and motherhood to primary education. We certainly do not want to return to the simplistic duality of home economics classes for girls and wood shop for boys.

Camille Paglia

Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys.

Camille Paglia

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.

Camille Paglia

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

Camille Paglia

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman's attention.

Camille Paglia

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

Camille Paglia

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

Camille Paglia

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.

Camille Paglia

I'm worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are being funneled through the cookie-cutter Ivy League and other elite schools and emerging with this callow anti-American, anti-military cast to their thinking.

Camille Paglia

Top 410 Quotes & Sayings by Camille Paglia

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