Paglia Quotes & Sayings

Enough already of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault poured like ketchup over everything. Lacan: the French fog machine; a grey-flannel worry-bone for toothless academic pups; a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt. Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso. The entire school of Saussure, inluding Levi-Strauss, write their muffled prose of people with cotton wool wrapped around their heads; they're like walking Q-tips. Derrida: a Gloomy Gus one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope already available in the varied armory of New Criticism. Derrida's method: masturbating without pleasure. It's a birdbrain game for birdseed stakes. Neo-Foucaldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knockng down the pins. — Camille Paglia

I love the Web, but the basis of my work is going through the physical books. When you go to the library, you see other books around on the shelves that you never knew existed. You can flip through a book and see the whole outline of it. — Camille Paglia

Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus , a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

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

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.? — Camille Paglia

I regard affirmative action as pernicious - a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women. — Camille Paglia

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

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

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers. — Camille Paglia

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

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

[Nietzsche thinks artists undersexed]:
"Their vampire, their talent, grudges them as a rule that squandering of force which one calls passion. If one has a talent, one is also its victim; one lives under the vampirism of one's talent."
Friedrich Nietzsche, as quoted in Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae — Camille Paglia

Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, and now there is struggle. Dim memories of life before the traumatic separation of birth may be the source of Arcadian fantasies of a lost golden age. — Camille Paglia

In America, Rousseauism has turned Freud's conflict-based psychoanalysis into weepy hand-holding. Contemporary liberalism is untruthful about cosmic realities. Therapy, defining anger and hostility in merely personal terms, seeks to cure what was never a problem before Rousseau. Mediterranean, as well as African-American, culture has a lavish system of language and gesture to channel and express negative emotion. Rousseauists who take the Utopian view of personality are always distressed or depressed over world outbreaks of violence and anarchy. But because, as a Sadean, I believe history is in nature and of it, I tend to be far more cheerful and optimistic than my liberal friends. Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium. Films like Seven Samurai (1954) and Two Women (1961) accurately show the breakdown of social controls as a regression to animal-like squalor. — Camille Paglia

I don't like reality shows and have never watched them, but I'm addicted to 'Real Housewives' because it's authentic old-time soap opera reborn! — Camille Paglia

Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women. — Camille Paglia

Effeminate men have suffered a bad press the world over. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

It is not true that I oppose government funding of the arts. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive. — Camille Paglia

Popular culture - above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R & B roots - did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk. — Leslie Fiedler

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. — Camille Paglia

[W]omen will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality. — Camille Paglia

My prescription for women entering the war zone of the professions: study football ... Women who want to remake the future should look for guidance not to substitute parent figures but to the brash assertions of pagan sport. — Camille Paglia

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

Much violence against women originates in emotional territory that they already command. By midlife and early old age, as the hormones of both genders change, women are in total, despotic control of their marriages. — Camille Paglia

Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered. — Camille Paglia

What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [ ... ] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks. — Camille Paglia

My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape. — Camille Paglia

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

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

Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts. — Camille Paglia

Despite hundreds of studies, cause-and-effect relationship between pornography and violence has never been satisfactorily proved. ? — Camille Paglia

We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives. — Camille Paglia

Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium. — Camille Paglia

My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm-as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy. — Camille Paglia

The Dionysian is no picnic. — Camille Paglia

Lately, I've been doing a lot of tuning in and impatiently tuning out. As a longtime fan of talk radio, I don't think this bodes well for the long-term broad appeal of the medium. — Camille Paglia

There you have it: an expensive higher education based on sloganeering, on pat, trite phrases that substitute moral posturing for political reasoning. It's elitism masquerading as egalitarianism. — Camille Paglia

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

What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization , an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women. — Camille Paglia

I was the first to advocate the Web. But I am very troubled by this thing that every kid must have a laptop computer. The kids are totally in the computer age. There's a whole new brain operation that's being moulded by the computer. — Camille Paglia

Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel. — Camille Paglia

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

Most people aren't sure what's going to happen on a first date. Given that ambiguity, every woman must be totally aware at every moment that she is responsible for every choice she makes ... protect yourselves. See trouble coming. — 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 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. — Camille Paglia

The [sexual harassment] situation has gotten so out of hand that, in 1993, in one of the first British cases, a plumber was fired for continuing to use the traditional term "ballcock" for the toilet flotation unit, instead of the new politically correct term, sanitized of sexual suggestiveness. This is insane. We are back to the Victorian era, when table legs had to be draped lest they put the thought of ladies' legs into someone's dirty mind. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

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

In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal. — Camille Paglia

I'm a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I'm an evangelist of popular culture, but when there's only media, then there's going to be a slow debasement of language, and that's what I think we're fighting. — Camille Paglia

My stress on the truth in sexual stereotypes and on the biologic basis of sex differences is sure to cause controversy. — Camille Paglia

The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words. — Camille Paglia

Beauty is our escape from the murky flesh-envelope that imprisons us. — 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

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

When anything goes, it's women who lose. — Camille Paglia

The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms. — 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

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

When I was a child, my father taught me to put up my fists like a boy and to be prepared to defend myself at all times. — 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

Perhaps there is no greater issue facing contemporary women than the choices they must make about balancing home and work. — Camille Paglia

All roads from Rousseau lead to Sade. — Camille Paglia

Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

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

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. — Camille Paglia

The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.' — Camille Paglia

Madonna has a far profounder vision of sex than do the feminists. She sees both the animality and the artifice. Changing her costume style and hair color virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure. Feminism says, 'No more masks.' Madonna says we are nothing but masks. Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism. — Camille Paglia

When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place. — Camille Paglia

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

Old school feminism, coveting social power, is blind to woman's cosmic sexual power. — Camille Paglia

I remember turning 'The Sopranos' on once and within two minutes nearly throwing a brick through the screen. — Camille Paglia

Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaver-like tunneling to the top. — Camille Paglia

Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome. — Camille Paglia

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

How many modern transsexuals are unacknowledged shamans? Perhaps it is to poets they should go for counsel, rather than surgeons. — Camille Paglia

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

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

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

Lesbian feminists, for all their ideals of sisterhood and solidarity, can treat each other with a fickleness, a parasitic exploitativeness, and vicious spite that have to be seen to be believed. — Camille Paglia

Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders. — Camille Paglia

Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae. — Camille Paglia

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

The Devil is a woman. — Camille Paglia

As a registered Democrat, I am praying for a credible presidential candidate to emerge from the younger tier of politicians in their late 40s. A governor with executive experience would be ideal. — Camille Paglia

Bravo's 'Real Housewives' series isn't just entertainment for devoted fans like me - it's an entire all-absorbing universe of pride and passion. — Camille Paglia

We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence. — Camille Paglia

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. — Camille Paglia

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

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