Camille Paglia is a well-known American academic and feminist with unique views on sexuality, culture and art.
She graduated as valedictorian from the State University of New York in 1968 and earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1974.
Paglia taught literature at several universities and wrote for Interview magazine and Salon.com.
In the 1990s she published three books sharing her unconventional opinions.
She advocates for educational reform and the abolition of certain college majors.
I have listed below some of the greatest quotes by Camille Paglia.
Best Camille Paglia Quotes
Modernization means Westernization. ~ Camille Paglia.
A woman simply is, but a man must become. ~ Camille Paglia.
Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary. ~ Camille Paglia.
Teaching is a performance art. ~ Camille Paglia.
Men chase by night those they will not greet by day. ~ Camille Paglia.
The more you know, the less you are impressed by Foucault. ~ Camille Paglia.
When I meet gay men anywhere in the world, there is a spontaneity and a spirit of fun and mischief that lesbians seem incapable of. ~ Camille Paglia.
Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses. ~ Camille Paglia.
Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork. ~ Camille Paglia.
Famous Camille Paglia Quotes
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. ~ Camille Paglia.
Social justice and compassion are compatible with an intelligent respect for private enterprise and law and order. ~ Camille Paglia.
Promiscuity in men may cheapen love but sharpen thought. Promiscuity in women is illness, a leakage of identity. ~ Camille Paglia.
The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it. ~ Camille Paglia.
Top Camille Paglia Quotes
Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones. ~ Camille Paglia.
Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents. ~ Camille Paglia.
Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America. ~ Camille Paglia.
Nature is always pulling the rug out from under our pompous ideals. ~ 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.
What is pretty in nature is confined to the thin skin of the globe upon which we huddle. Scratch that skin, and nature’s daemonic ugliness will erupt. ~ Camille Paglia.
The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal. ~ Camille Paglia.
If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct – unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where women clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers. ~ Camille Paglia.
Popular Camille Paglia Quotes
Rule of art: Cant kills creativity! ~ Camille Paglia.
Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe. ~ Camille Paglia.
A society that forgets about art risks losing its soul. ~ Camille Paglia.
If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts. ~ Camille Paglia.
Children are monsters of unbridled egotism and will, for they spring directly from nature, hostile intimations of immorality. ~ Camille Paglia.
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.
Profound Camille Paglia Quotes
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.
If someone offends you by speech, you must learn to defend yourself by speech. ~ Camille Paglia.
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. ~ Camille Paglia.
The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they’re dead is the nasty things I’ve said about them. ~ Camille Paglia.
Imperialism and slavery are no white male monopoly, but are everywhere from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia to India, China and Japan. ~ Camille Paglia.
The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again. ~ 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.
Thought-Provoking Camille Paglia Quotes
Hollywood, America’s greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind. ~ Camille Paglia.
Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendence. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on. ~ 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.
The Devil is a woman. ~ Camille Paglia.
What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women. ~ Camille Paglia.
Transvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son. ~ Camille Paglia.
Academic Marxism is a fantasy world, and unctuous compassion-sweepstakes, into which real workers or peasants never penetrate. ~ Camille Paglia.
Liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother. ~ Camille Paglia.
Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature. ~ Camille Paglia.
Insightful Camille Paglia Quotes
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.
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.
Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature’s power. ~ Camille Paglia.
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.
My anti-liberal position should not be mistaken for conservatism… ~ Camille Paglia.
Interesting Camille Paglia Quotes
Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct. ~ Camille Paglia.
Men knew that if they devirginized a woman, they could end up dead within twenty-four hours. These controls have been removed. ~ Camille Paglia.
Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women’s movement of the late 1960s and ’70s. ~ Camille Paglia.
Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing. ~ Camille Paglia.
Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself. ~ Camille Paglia.
So these were the 65 top quotes about Camille Paglia.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Malala Yousafzai quotes and Mary Wollstonecraft quotes.
