Camille Paglia Quotes

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.

Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.

Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west`s stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art`s assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.

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!

When anything goes, it`s women who lose.

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.

Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It`s part of the sizzle.

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman`s attention.

If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.

The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.

The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they`re dead is the nasty things I`ve said about them.

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.

A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.

If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn`t repel them.

Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.

Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.

Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.

Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.

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

Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.

There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist

History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence