Camille Paglia Quotes (1947-)

“Academe has become a multinational corporation, and scholars have become businessmen, mobile merchants on the make.”

“Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?”

“The Seventies French fad was a flight from Sixties truths, a reactionary escape into false abstraction and rationalism, masquerading as distrust of reason.”

“Academe has become a multinational corporation, and scholars have become businessmen, mobile merchants on the make.”

“Imperialism and slavery are no white male monopoly, but are everywhere from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia to India, China and Japan.”

“Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.”

“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 philosopher sympathetic to Foucault recently remarked to me, Foucault failed in each of his major inquiries and, in desperation, went further afield from his areas of expertise. The History of Sexuality is a disaster. Page after page is sheer fantasy, unsupported by the ancient or modern historical record. [...] Foucault, like David Letterman, made smirking glibness an art form.”

“Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.”

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

“We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism.”

“The Fairie Queene makes cinema out of the west's primary principle: to see is to know; to know is to control. The Spenserian eye cuts, wounds, rapes.”

“American feminism’s nose dive began when Kate Millet, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies.”

“Harold Bloom scribbled in the margin of a draft of my dissertation in 1971, "Mere Sontagisme!" It saddened me, but I knew Bloom was right. Sontag, who should have been Jane Harrison's successor as a supreme woman scholar, had become synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing.”

“I'm happy with what Trump has done, because he's totally blown up the media! All of a sudden, ‘BOOM!' That lack of caution and shooting from the hip. He's not a president, of course. He's not remotely a president. He has no political skills of any kind. He's simply an American citizen who is creating his own bully pulpit.”

“Three years ago Camille Paglia told me that she had "single-handedly turned the ocean liner of feminism" around, a wonderfully appropriate metaphor for a woman who, wherever she is, shouts like a foghorn in an Atlantic mist.”

“The 1990s brought a widespread backlash against this rigid feminist orthodoxy [in American academia]. For many, it was personified by Camille Paglia, a professor at an obscure university in Philadelphia, who, in her 1990 book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, as well as in scores of essays and interviews, dismissed women’s contributions to Western culture (“There are no female Mozarts”) and mocked the “weepy, whiny, white middle-class ideology” of the “Stalinist” feminist movement under Gloria Steinem, which Paglia reviled for its intellectual vacuity, sexual puritanism, and hostility to men -- not to mention its obsessive victim mentality, which, in her view, only served to reinforce Victorian stereotypes. For Paglia, women, far from being the weaker sex, were gifted by nature with an innate power over men -- the power of sex. […] The feminist establishment, however, chose not to learn from but to vilify Paglia and company. And Women’s Studies, unable to answer them, all but ignored them.”

“Camille, in terms of the achievement of Sexual Personae, belongs at a place like Yale or Harvard or Princeton or Chicago or Berkeley. But they will not have her. One of the many, many signs of the incredible decadence of our academic institutions is that someone as brilliant, as learned, as talented, and as ferociously burning an intellect as Camille Paglia is much less likely to win conferment at one of our major universities than any of these humdrum bureaucrats of resentment who are appointed by others in the network because they are politically correct.”

“The person that made this newfound pursuit of intellectual engagement invigorating and sexy was Camille Paglia. Her book, Sexual Personae, made me realize how little I really had learned in college. Her articles and assorted writings began to open my mind to the fraud that is higher education in America.”

“Paglia, a controversial professor... author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence... revealed that she never, not for a moment, felt like a woman. She had never felt like a man either, and she called this lifelong reality her radical gender dysphoria. I had never heard of such a thing. So here I was, once again, trying to process a news story that combined an issue of sexuality, controversy, and unclear boundaries. I looked up the meaning of her words and found another term for this: nonbinary.”

“The literary critic Camille Paglia argues that sexuality is by nature aggressive. “My theory,” she says [on page 3 of Sexual Personae] “is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind.” She attacks feminists who believe that sex is all sugar and spice and that it is patriarchal society that makes sex violent. Sex, for Paglia, is about power; society is not the source of sexual violence; sex, the irrepressible natural force, is. If anything, society is the force that inhibits the natural violence of sex. Paglia is certainly more accurate than those who deny that perversion is rife with aggression. But in assuming that sex is fundamentally aggressive, and sadomasochistic, she doesn’t allow for the plasticity of human sexuality. Just because sex and aggression can unite in a plastic brain, and appear “natural,” doesn’t mean that that is their only possible expression.”

“Examples [of censorship and intolerance from self-described 'liberals'] are well-known. When Camille Paglia was invited to speak at Brown, campus feminists were outraged, though their voices greatly outnumbered hers...”

“How can you take her seriously? She is an exhibitionist, and she takes the most extreme elements of the women's movement and tries to make the whole movement antisexual, antilife, antijoy. And neither I nor most of the women I know are that way.”

“There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, 'Poor dear, it's probably PMS.' Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, 'What an asshole.' Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole.”

“[T]he most threatening thing about her, from the American viewpoint, is that she refuses to treat the arts as an instrument of civil rights. Without talent, no entitlement.”

“When pro-choice social commentator Camille Paglia wrote that she sanctions "murder" when it is called "abortion," pro-lifers were horrified. They should have cheered. […] Almost every pro-abortion activist lives in a zone where they conceal what abortion really is -- though they know that the procedure involves killing a person each and every time. The difference between them and Paglia is that they don't come out and say it.”

“When I mentioned to friends that I was heading to Philadelphia to meet Camille Paglia, I realized the degree of animosity she provokes. She was contemptuously dismissed, often by people who had never read her work. Others seemed torn by her … Some praised her as fresh and profound, but even more dismissed her as outrageous and repugnant. … Despite such opinions, in person and in context instead of in sound bites, Paglia is often reasonable, witty and likable … She is also correct in at least one of her assessments — that she, like such loudmouths as Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and Ross Perot, helps to encourage discourse and free speech in a country that needs all it can get.”

“It is very rare these days to hear anyone praising masculinity. The dissident feminist writer Camille Paglia is a refreshing example. Her observations are effective antidotes to the surfeit of disparagements.”

“Scholars who refuse to toe the feminist line are also ignored... The iconoclastic Camille Paglia appears [only] once [...], in Women’s Realities, Women’s Choices, and is described as someone who “assails feminists for what she regards as dull rhetoric.””