Camille Paglia Quotes

• Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.

  Camille Paglia

• The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

  Camille Paglia

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

  Camille Paglia

  Topics in Mother

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• Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion!

  Camille Paglia

• When anything goes, it’s women who lose.

  Camille Paglia

• 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.

  Camille Paglia

• Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

  Camille Paglia

• You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of s*x comes from the danger of s*x. You can be overpowered.

  Camille Paglia

• Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.

  Camille Paglia

• 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.

  Camille Paglia

  Topics in Beauty

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

  Camille Paglia

• Woman is the dominant s*x. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman’s attention.

  Camille Paglia

• We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. S*x, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.

  Camille Paglia

• American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.

  Camille Paglia

• 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.

  Camille Paglia

• There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

  Camille Paglia

• The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation’s egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.

  Camille Paglia

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

  Camille Paglia

• Despite crime’s omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.

  Camille Paglia

• The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.

  Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia (103)

Birth:	2nd April, 1947
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Critic, Professor

About

Camille Paglia was born in Endicott, New York. She is an American author, cultural critic and professor. Paglia, a self-described dissident feminist, has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson and a collection of essays, Sex, Art, and American Culture. Her most recent book is 2012's Glittering Images. She is a critic of American feminism and of post-structuralist theory as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of U.S. social culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.

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• 1919 - Theodore Roosevelt
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