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Camille Paglia
324 quotes
“[Henry] James’s repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is no coincidence that while some major female artists have married, very few have borne children. The issue is not conservation of energy but imaginative integrity. Art is its own self-swelling, proof that the mind is greater than the body.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called "conservative," as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Madonna won my undying loyalty by reviving and re-creating the hard glamour of the studio-era Hollywood movie queens, figures of mythological grandeur. Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex. Woman’s sexual glamour has bewitched and destroyed men since Delilah and Helen of Troy.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to women’s cosmic power.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gay and straight men have much more in common than do gay men with lesbians or straight men with straight women. Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he he just falls back into her and is swallowed up. This is the agonizing myth-pattern in the comic, matricidal Psycho (1960), one of the hauntingly emblematic films of our time.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Contemporary feminists, who are generally poor or narrowly trained scholars, insist on viewing history as a weepy scenario of male oppression and female victimization. But it is more accurate to see men, driven by sexual anxiety away from their mothers, forming group alliances by male bonding to create complex structures of society, art, science and technology.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When women cut themselves off from men, they sink backward into psychological and spiritual stagnancy.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The saints, many of them women, warred with themselves as well as God. The body has its own animal urges, just as there are attractions and repulsions in sex that modern liberalism cannot face.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it is one of the greatest pictures ever taken of a woman.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Patti Smith on the cover of Smith’s debut album Horses (1975), p. 45
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and is confirmed only by other men. Feminist fantasies about the ideal “sensitive” male have failed. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Feminism was always wrong to pretend that women could “have it all.” It is not male society but mother nature who lays the heaviest burden on woman. No husband or day care can adequately substitute for a mother’s attention. My feminist heroes are the boldly independent and childless Amelia Earhart and Katherine Hepburn, who has been outspoken in her opposition to the delusion of “having it all.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]omen will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea that feminism is the first group that has ever denounced rape is a gross libel to men. Throughout history, rape has been condemned by honorable men. Honorable men do not murder; honorable men do not steal; honorable men do not rape. It goes all the way back through history. Tarquin’s rape of Lucretia caused the fall of the tyrants and the beginning of the Roman Republic. The idea that somehow suddenly feminism miraculously found out that women were being exploited and raped throughout history is ridiculous.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here’s a lot to be said for celibacy, for the concentration of your mental and physical energy.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My position on date rape is partly based on my study of The Faerie Queen, as detailed in a full chapter in Sexual Personae: in 1590, the poet Edmund Spencer already sees that passive, drippy, naive women constantly get themselves into rape scenarios, while talented, intelligent, alert women, his warrior heroines, spot trouble coming and boldly trounce their male assailants. My feminism stresses courage, independence, self-reliance, and pride.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rape is an outrage that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society. Yet feminism, which has waged a crusade for rape to be taken more seriously, has put young women in danger by hiding the truth about sex from them.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, “Rape is a crime of violence but not of sex.” This sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism, they do not expect rape from the nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Feminism, coveting social power, is blind to women’s cosmic sexual power.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A male student makes vulgar remarks about your breasts? Don't slink off to whimper with the campus shrinking violets. Deal with it. On the spot. Say, "Shut up, you jerk! And crawl back to the barnyard where you belong!" In general, women who project this take-charge attitude towards life get harassed less often. I see too many dopey, immature, self-pitying young women walking around like melting sticks of butter.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beware of the manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern. And don’t look for sexual enlightenment from academe, which spews out mountains of books but never looks at life directly.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s these guys in the Ivy League schools who get used to obeying women. They’re sedentary guys. It’s ironic that you’re getting the biggest bitching about men from the schools where the men are just eunuchs and bookworms.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve watched therapy getting more and more mushy in the past fifteen years in America.... It’s become what I call coercive compassion. It’s disgusting, it’s condescending, it’s insulting, it’s coddling, it keeps everyone in an infantile condition rather than in the adult condition that was the ultimate goal of Freudian analysis.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What women have to realize is their own dominance as a sex. That women’s sexual powers are enormous. All cultures have seen it. Men know it. Women know it. The only people who don’t know it are feminists. Desensualized, desexualized, neurotic women. I wouldn’t have said this twenty years ago because I was a militant feminist myself. But as the years have gone on, I began to see more and more that the perverse, neurotic psychodramas projected by these women is coming from their own problems with sex.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel that the moment a date happens that it’s a social encounter that is potentially a sexual encounter. And the question of sex needs to be negotiated from the first moment on.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men knew that if they devirginized a woman, they could end up dead within twenty-four hours. These controls have been removed.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Feminism’s claim that it discovered rape is simply false.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The truth is that Foucault knew very little about anything before the seventeenth century and, in the modern world, outside France. His familiarity with the literature and art of any period was negligible. His hostility to psychology made him incompetent to deal with sexuality, his own or anybody else’s. The elevation of Foucault to guru status by American and British academics is a tale that belongs to the history of cults.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more you know, the less you are impressed by Foucault.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many, perhaps most, very learned people prefer the company of their books to sitting in a crowd listening to history and art being mangled; furthermore, it is unlikely that the venerable scholars will stand up afterward to declare, “This lecture was a load of crap.” The more profound a professor’s distaste with the proceedings, the more likely he is to melt away at the end of the talk.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not since the Black Panthers sailed into their Upper East Side tea party has there been so daffy an exercise in radical chic.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1974 I nearly got into a fistfight with some early academic feminists in a restaurant when I casually alluded to a hormonal element in sex differences. It was utterly unacceptable at that time to think or say such a thing. … If you have any doubts about the effect of hormones on emotion, libido and aggression, have a chat with a transexual, who must take hormones medically. He or she will set you straight.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a philosopher sympathetic to Foucault recently remarked to me, Foucault failed in each of his major inquiries and, in desperation, went further afield from his areas of expertise. The History of Sexuality is a disaster. Page after page is sheer fantasy, unsupported by the ancient or modern historical record.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Foucault, like David Letterman, made smirking glibness an art form.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The born-yesterday French-besotted faddists, addicted sniffers of wet printer’s ink, think they’re starting on the ground floor; so they’re condemned to another hundred years of trial and error. The rest of us can safely ignore them.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source