Camille Paglia quotes - page 2

One of the most startling discoveries of my career was when I realized that the strongest women in the world are not lesbians but heterosexual women, who know how to handle men. (Camille Paglia)
It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal. View quote
Camille Paglia
The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God's enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God's true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent. View quote
Camille Paglia
What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women. View quote
Camille Paglia
The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it. View quote
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others. View quote
Camille Paglia
Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him. View quote
Camille Paglia
When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble. (Camille Paglia)
The unhappy truth is that male homosexuality will never be fully accepted by the heterosexual majority, who are obeying the dictates not of bigoted society or religion but of procreative nature. View quote
Camille Paglia
Modernization means Westernization. View quote
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
Men knew that if they devirginized a woman, they could end up dead within twenty-four hours. These controls have been removed. View quote
Camille Paglia
Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son. View quote
Camille Paglia
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. View quote
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
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. View quote
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)
Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands. View quote
Camille Paglia
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no. View quote
Camille Paglia
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. View quote
Camille Paglia