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Camille Paglia Quotes

born 1947 United States

Camille Paglia (born 2 April 1947) is an American author, scholar, feminist and critic, best known for writing Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, a survey of Western art and literature from earliest recorded history to the 20th Century.

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Random Camille Paglia quote

247 quotes

In pondering why a battered woman does not leave, we must remember that gay men with a taste for violent “rough trade” have always paid for this kind of sex.

Vamps and Tramps (1994)

Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It's an illusion.

Sexuality and Gender (2002)

We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, the site of our biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

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.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Pornography is art, sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant. Its glut and glitter are a Babylonian excess.

Vamps and Tramps (1994)

Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America.

Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

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

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

Sexual Personae (1990)

Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity’s ancient campaign against pagan nature.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

The idea that the stars literally influence men (by a falling fluid, an influenza) is plainly untenable. But that the movements of the constellations are a clock by which earthly changes can be measured is less easy to dismiss.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.

Vamps and Tramps (1994)

I am being vilified by feminists for merely having a common-sense attitude about rape.

Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

What women have to realize is their own dominance as a sex.

Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.

Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Camille Paglia (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.