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Camille Paglia
324 quotes
“Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men [e.g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] in the German and British academic tradition.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am a passionate admire of Sappho, but that has to be one of the stupidest sentences I have ever seen in a scholarly book.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In high school in the early Sixties, I dreamed of intellectual work by women that would match the highest male standards and set men on their ear. A lot of women have done a lot of academic work since then, but most of them fall short of that standard.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow “expertise” and “theoretical sophistication” (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought. … Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The spiritual history of the Sixties has yet to be written.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I realize now how lucky I was, in the total absence of role models, to have only men to rebel against. Today's women students are meeting their oppressors in dangerously seductive new form, as successful congenial female professors who view themselves as victims of a rigid foreign ideology.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The followers of Derrida are pathetic, snuffling in French pockets for bits of pieces of a deconstructive method already massively and coherently presented — and with a mature sense of the sacred — in Buddhism and Hinduism.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Sixties attempted a return to nature that ended in disaster.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everyone of my generation who preached free love is responsible for AIDS.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Seventies theory explosion [i.e., Literary theory, deconstruction, etc.] was a panic reaction by headlocked pedants unable to cope with the emotional and sensory flux of the Sixties. It was a desperate search for new authority, new dogma.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The smouldering eroticism of great European actresses like Jeanne Moreau demonstrated to my generations women's archetypal mystery and glamour, completely missing from the totalitarian world-view of the misogynist Foucault. For me, the big French D is not Derrida, but Deneuve.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sedgwick has managed to convert pedestrian critical skills and little discernible knowledge in history, philosophy, psychology, art or even pre-modern literature into a lucrative academic career.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The junk-bond era has also spawned something that calls itself New Historicism. This seems to be a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or political science. [...] To practice it, you must apparently lack all historical sense.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Foucault is the Cagliostro of our time.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most serious flaw of Foucault's system is in the area of sex. I view his hurried, compulsive writing as a massive rationalist defense-formation to avoid thinking about (a) woman, (b) nature, (c) emotion, and (d) the sexual body. His attempt to make the body passive property of male society is an evasion of the universal fact so intolerable to him: that we are all born of human mothers. By turning women into ciphers, he miniaturizes and contains them.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being “exposed.” As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The piddling ignoramuses who deny that there is a distinct, discernible, objective western tradition are just woozy literati.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Imperialism and slavery are no white male monopoly, but are everywhere from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia to India, China and Japan.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modernization means Westernization.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women's studies is institutionalized sexism.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women's studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink. It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Academic Marxism is a fantasy world, and unctuous compassion-sweepstakes, into which real workers or peasants never penetrate.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hitchcock finds women captivating but dangerous. She allures by nature but she is chief artificer in civilisation, a magic fabricator of persona whose very smile is an arc of deception.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ten thousand years ago, when man the nomad took root in one place, he brought animals with him into human service. But domestication was to be his fate too, as he fell under architecturally reinforced female control.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women will never succeed at the level or in the numbers they deserve until they get over their genteel reluctance to take abuse in the attack and counterattack of territorial warfare. The recent trend in feminism, notably in sexual harassment policy, has been to overrely on regulation and legislation rather than to promote personal responsibility. Women must not become wards and supplicants of authority figures. Freedom means rejecting dependency.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe — the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most professors know that American higher education in the humanities is in a deplorable state. Yet many remain silent, perhaps through prudent self-preservation, which is starting to look a lot like moral cowardice. They have put loyalty to their colleagues before loyalty to their students, ostensibly the raison d'être for educational institutions. How many more minds must be distorted or destroyed before the faculty decides to defend the Western intellectual values of free inquiry and orderly acquisition of knowledge?”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even the most morbid of the rape ranters have a childlike faith in the perfectibility of the universe, which they see as blighted solely by nasty men. They simplistically project outward onto a mythical "patriarchy" their own inner conflicts and moral ambiguities.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man has traditionally ruled the social sphere; feminism tells him to move over and share his power. But woman rules the sexual and emotional sphere, and there she has no rival. Victim ideology, a caricature of social history, blocks women from recognition of their dominance in the deepest, most important realm.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as “misogynous.” In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies … there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women’s actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The dishonesty and speciousness of the feminist rape analysis are demonstrated by its failure to explore, or even mention, man-on-man sex crimes. If rape were really just a process of intimidation of women by men, why do men rape and kill other men? The deceptively demure persona of the soft-spoken, homosexual serial-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, like that of the handsome, charming Ted Bundy, should warn everyone that we still live in a sexual jungle.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Following the sexual revolution of the Sixties, dating has become a form of Russian roulette. Some girls have traditional religious values and mean to remain virgins until marriage. Others are leery of AIDS, unsure of what they want, but can be convinced. For others, anything goes: they’ll jump into bed on the first date. What’s a guy to do?”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a teacher, I have seen time and again a certain kind of American middle-class girl who projects winsome malleability, a soft, unfocused help-me-please persona that, in adult life, is a recipe for disaster. These are the ones who end up with a string of abusive boyfriends or in sticky situations with overfamiliar male authority figures who call them “honey.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source