Camille Paglia Quotes

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!

Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.

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.

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

Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin.

When anything goes, it's women who lose.

My dream is someday to have a bank of TVs, where all the different channels could be on and I could be monitoring them. I would love that. The more the better. I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it's TV ... Because that's TV's mode. That's the Age of Hollywood. The idea of PBS - heavy-duty Masterpiece Theater, Bill Moyers - I hate all that.

I sometimes call my new system 'Italian pagan Catholicism,' but it could more accurately be called 'pragmatic liberalism,' with roots in Enlightenment political philosophy. It is a synthesis of the enduring dual elements in our culture, pagan and Judeo-Christian, Romantic and Classic.

Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.

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.

I feel genuinely sorry for those who are so blinded by narrow partisanship that they cannot appreciate Limbaugh's energy, intelligence and satiric skill. They live in a box with bags over their heads. Though he and I hardly agree on politics (I voted for Ralph Nader last year and may go Green again in 2004), I respect Limbaugh as a political analyst and deft rhetorician who is a master of the microphone and who knows how to engage and challenge a vast audience.

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

Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.

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

Today, the ideal male is the gay man and the ideal female is the worker female, the woman who can work in a coal mine just like all the other men.

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

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.

I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

[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.

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.

Despite popular opinion, there are no important parallels between Madonna and Monroe, who was a virtuoso comedienne but who was in secure, depressive, passive-aggressive, and infuriatingly obstructionist in her career habits. Madonna is manic, perfectionist, workaholic. Monroe abused alcohol and drugs, while Madonna shuns them. Monroe had a tentative, melting, dreamy solipsism; Madonna has Judy Holliday's wisecracking smart mouth and Joan Crawford's steel will and bossy, circus master managerial competence.

Psychoanalysis [...] overestimates the linguistic character of the unconscious. Dreaming is a pagan cinema.

Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.

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.

Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality.

The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.

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

Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son.

I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.

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

Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.

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

Men, gay or straight, can get beauty and lewdness into one image. Women are forever softening, censoring, politicizing. ?

I want young women when they're 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives.

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.

My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself We need more dissent and less dogma.

History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence.

I've always felt that the obligation of teachers is to have a huge, broad overview and to provide a foundation course to the students. The long view of history is absolutely crucial.

I guess I'm just a natural warrior.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anyone who gets his or her political news primarily from the New York Times (which made the ethically challenged carpetbagger Hillary a senator) is a fool.

At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father's business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains.?

Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him.

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.

Government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior.

The Bobbit case, which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic art works like Bizet's Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of love, jealousy and revenge than do all the pat formulas of the counseling industry.

Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism . My grandmother was sill scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard !

Promiscuity in men may cheapen love but sharpen thought. Promiscuity in women is illness, a leakage of identity.

What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions.

Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son.

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.

As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear.

Social justice and compassion are compatible with an intelligent respect for private enterprise and law and order.

I support, defend, and admire prostitutes, gay or straight. They do important and necessary work, whether moralists of the Left and Right like it or not. Feminists who think they can abolish the sex trade are in a state of massive delusion. Only a ruthless, fascist regime of vast scale could eradicate the rogue sex impulse that is indistinguishable from the life force. Simply in the Western world, pagan sexuality has survived 2000 years of Judaeo-Christian persecution and is hardly going to be defeated by a few feminists whacking at it with their brooms.

Madonna remains the most visible performer on the planet, as well as one of the wealthiest, but would anyone seriously say that artistic self-development is her primary motivating principle? She is too busy with Kabbalah, fashion merchandising, adoption melodramas, the gym, and ill-starred horseback riding to study art.

Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones

If people could see the inside of my brain, I would be in prison.

I believe that government should confine itself to the public realm and that it should be as stripped down as possible, within reason. It should not be burdened by excess bureaucracy.

The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it.

Whiffle [whine and wheeze and snuff and sniffle]: The annoying scratchy sound made by weepy feminists as they lament the sufferings of women and, houndlike, sniff out evidence of male oppression.

Elizabeth Taylor is, in my opinion, the greatest actress in film history. She instinctively understands the camera and its nonverbal intimacies. Opening her violet eyes, she takes us into the liquid realm of emotion, which she inhabits by Pisces intuition. Richard Burton said that Taylor showed him how to act for the camera. Economy and understatement are essential. At her best, Elizabeth Taylor simply is. An electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens. It is an extra-sensory, pagan phenomenon.

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.

Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt.

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.

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

Last time I checked, there were no Americans at all in Renaissance art.

My problem is that I do not get along with lesbians at all. They don't like me, and I don't like them.

Male urination is a form of commentary.

At some level, all love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts.

My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility

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.

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

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.

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

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.

'Mad Men' doesn't capture one single thing about the decor, costumes, or sexual interaction. It is a total projection of contemporary snarky attitudes into the past.

My grandfather worked in a shoe factory - he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family.

If feminism has receded in visibility and prestige, it is precisely because its vision of life's goals and rewards has become too narrow and elitist.

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

Butchery is not the point of vampirism. Sex - domination and submission - is.

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.

Not untill all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son. But in a totalitarian future that has removed procreation from woman's hands, there will also be no affect and no art. Men will be machines, without pain but also without pleasure. Imagination has a price, which we are paying every day. There is no escape from the biologic chains that bind us.

I'm very pro-American - my entire family escaped poverty in Italy because they rightly believed in the American dream.

We're in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized--"Don't ask any questions!" "No discussion!" "Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!" And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There's nothing interesting being written--in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions.

So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton--aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile--they're engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power--and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy.


Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, "Sexual Personae"--which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It's too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven's sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories fr

The only way to teach focus is to present the eye with opportunities for steady perception - best supplied by the contemplation of art. Looking at art requires stillness and receptivity, which realign our senses and produce a magical tranquillity.

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.

Not since the Black Panthers sailed into their Upper East Side tea party has there been so daffy an exercise in radical chic.

A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on 'All My Children' when half the women actors, young and old, seem to be afflicted by android Barbie creep. All those thick swatches of lifeless strands clustering lankly round ladies' necks! Like orange tanning spray, this is a fashion fad that should be put out of its misery.

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.

Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night.

All great stars are competitive. That's a sign of a true artist - if you don't have the fire of competition deep down inside, you're never going to achieve anything. You have to want to be king of the heap.

I believe that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly due to their Seventies delusions that a world without women was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally tore the body apart.