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Camille Paglia
324 quotes
“It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone. The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them. One of the main premises was to demonstrate that pornography is everywhere in major art. Art history as written is completely sex free, repressive and puritanical. I want precision and historical knowledge, but at the same time, I try to zap it with pornographic intensity.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Response to criticism of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, as quoted in "20Q: Camille Paglia" by Warren Kalbacker in Playboy magazine (October 1991); also in Gauntlet # 4 (1992), p. 1…
“I have been studying it [sexuality] since before it became fashionable. At the Yale Grad School, for example, where I was from 1968 to 1972, I was literally the only person in the humanities departments doing a dissertation on sex — hard to believe now, but I was a real pioneer and I took the career hit for it. It was considered tacky, low, not serious — my dears, I was absolutely scouring the Yale archives for every bit of dirt on homosexuality, sadomasochism, transvestism — you name it. That is the basis of the research for my first book, Sexual Personae, which was my dissertation.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: When asked "why you write about sex?" Paglia on AOL (11 September 1996)
“Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It's an illusion. Men are pussy-whipped. And they know it. That's what the strip clubs are about; not woman as victim, not woman as slave, but woman as goddess.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Sexuality and Gender (2002) by Christine R. Williams and Arlene Stein, p. 213
“The feminist line is, strippers and topless dancers are degraded, subordinated, and enslaved; they are victims, turned into objects by the display of their anatomy. But women are far from being victims — women rule; they are in total control … the feminist analysis of prostitution says that men are using money as power over women. I'd say, yes, that's all that men have. The money is a confession of weakness. They have to buy women's attention. It's not a sign of power; it's a sign of weakness.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Sexuality and Gender (2002) by Christine R. Williams and Arlene Stein, p. 213
“The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Break, Blow, Burn (2005)
“As texting has become the default discourse for an entire generation, the ability to read real-life facial expressions and body language is alarmingly atrophying.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Sex from Plato to Paglia : A Philosophical Encyclopedia (2006) by Alan Soble, Volume 2, p. 378,
“Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Quotable Bitch: Women Who Tell It Like It Really Is (2007) edited by Jessie Shiers, p. 167
“She is a brittle, relentless manipulator with few stable core values who shuffles through useful personalities like a card shark ("Cue the tears!"). Forget all her little gold crosses: Hillary's real god is political expediency. Do Americans truly want this hard-bitten Machiavellian back in the White House? Day one will just be more of the same.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Hillary Rodham Clinton, in "Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Iran and More" at Salon.com (8 January 2008)
“I plan to vote for Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary because he is a rational, centered personality who speaks the language of idealism and national unity. Obama has served longer as an elected official than Hillary. He has had experience as a grass-roots activist, and he is also a highly educated lawyer who will be a quick learner in office. His international parentage and childhood, as well as his knowledge of both Christianity and Islam, would make him the right leader at the right time. And his wife Michelle is a powerhouse. The Obamas represent the future, not the past.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Iran and More" at Salon.com (8 January 2008)
“Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Babylon Nights : A David Spandau Novel" (2010) by Daniel Depp
“Sexual Personae seeks to demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture — something that has inspired little belief since the period before World War I.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My stress on the truth in sexual stereotypes and on the biologic basis of sex differences is sure to cause controversy.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects governments to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother. Feminism has inherited these contradictions.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood. 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. But science is always playing catch-up ball. Nature breaks its own rules whenever it wants. Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt. 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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness. The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Judaism, Christianity’s parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that the differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness. Judeo-Christianity, like Greek worship of the Olympian gods, is a sky-cult. It is an advanced stage in the history of religion, which everywhere began as earth-cult, veneration of fruitful nature.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The evolution of earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm. Her mysterious procreative powers and the resemblance of her rounded breasts, belly, and hips to earth’s contours put her at the center of early symbolism. She was the model for the Great Mother figures who crowded the birth of religion worldwide. But the mother cults did not mean freedom for women. On the contrary […] cult objects are prisoners of their own symbolic inflation. Every totem lives in taboo.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, the site of our biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Devil is a woman.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of western culture is a distortion of reality. But reality should be distorted; that is, imaginatively amended. The Buddhist acquiescence to nature is neither accurate about nature nor just to human potential.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Metaphorically, every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered. The basic mechanics of conception require action in the male but nothing more than passive receptivity in the female.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature is a Darwinian spectacle of the eaters and the eaten. All phases of procreation are ruled by appetite: sexual intercourse, from kissing to penetration, consists of movements of barely controlled cruelty and consumption. The long pregnancy of the human female and the protracted childhood of her infant, who is not self-sustaining for seven years or more, have produced the agon of psychological dependency that burdens the male for a lifetime. Man justifiably fears being devoured by woman, who is nature’s proxy.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mind is a captive of the body.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every man harbors an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love for all means coldness to something or someone. Even Jesus, let us recall, was unnecessarily rude to his mother at Cana.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every fetus becomes female unless it is steeped in male hormone, produced by a signal from the testes. Before birth, therefore, a male is already beyond the female. But to be beyond is to be exiled from the center of life. 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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An erection is a thought and the orgasm an act of the imagination. The male has to will his sexual authority before the woman who is a shadow of his mother and of all women. Failure and humiliation constantly wait in the wings. No woman has to prove herself a woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man. He must perform, or the show does not go on. Social convention is irrelevant. A flop is a flop.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women have conceptualized less in history not because men have kept them from doing so but because women do not need to conceptualize in order to exist. […] Fetishism, for instance, a practice which like most of the sex perversions is confined to men, is clearly a conceptualizing or symbol-making activity. Man’s vastly greater commercial patronage of pornography is analogous.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an orgasm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery surrounds women’s sexuality. This mystery is the main reason for the imprisonment man has imposed on women. Only by confining his wife in a locked harem guarded by eunuchs could he be certain that her son was also his.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The old “double standard” gave men a sexual liberty denied to women. Marxist feminists reduced the historical cult of woman’s virginity to her property value, her worth on the male marriage market. I would argue instead that there was and is a biological basis to the double standard. The first medical reports on the disease killing male homosexuals [i.e., AIDS] indicated men most at risk were those with a thousand partners over their lifetime. Incredulity. Who could such people be? Why, it turns out, everyone one knew. Serious, kind, literate men, not bums or thugs.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Freud says, “Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling.” Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source