Camille Paglia quotes - page 5

The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style. (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. View quote
Camille Paglia
Mind is a captive of the body. View quote
Camille Paglia
When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde. View quote
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
Capitalism is an art form. View quote
Camille Paglia
Love for all means coldness to something or someone. Even Jesus, let us recall, was unnecessarily rude to his mother at Cana. View quote
Camille Paglia
In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace. View quote
Camille Paglia
The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words. View quote
Camille Paglia
Not since the Black Panthers sailed into their Upper East Side tea party has there been so daffy an exercise in radical chic. View quote
Camille Paglia
The Devil is a woman. (Camille Paglia)
In 1974 I nearly got into a fistfight with some early academic feminists in a restaurant when I casually alluded to a hormonal element in sex differences. It was utterly unacceptable at that time to think or say such a thing. ... If you have any doubts about the effect of hormones on emotion, libido and aggression, have a chat with a transexual, who must take hormones medically. He or she will set you straight. View quote
Camille Paglia
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
No one is "born gay.” The idea is ridiculous, but it is symptomatic of our overpoliticized climate that such assertions are given instant credence by gay activists and their media partisans. I think what gay men are remembering is that they were born different. View quote
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
Men, gay or straight, can get beauty and lewdness into one image. Women are forever softening, censoring, politicizing. View quote
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)
The born-yesterday French-besotted faddists, addicted sniffers of wet printer's ink, think they're starting on the ground floor; so they're condemned to another hundred years of trial and error. The rest of us can safely ignore them. View quote
Camille Paglia
For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to women's cosmic power. View quote
Camille Paglia
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard! View quote
Camille Paglia