Camille Paglia Quotes
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It is no coincidence that while some major female artists have married, very few have borne children. The issue is not conservation of energy but imaginative integrity. Art is its own self-swelling, proof that the mind is greater than the body.
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We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end.
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I believe that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly due to their Seventies delusionism that a world without women was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally tore the body apart.
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Love for all means coldness to something or someone. Even Jesus, let us recall, was unnecessarily rude to his mother at Cana.
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Lacan, Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.
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My own proposals for reform in academia include the abolition of all literary conferences and the replacement of women's studies with sex studies, based on the rigorous study of world history, anthropology, psychology, and science. Today, in politically correct America, questions of quality, learning, and intellectual distinction are out of style.
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When women cut themselves off from men, they sink backward into psychological and spiritual stagnancy.
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When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.
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Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America.
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Effeminate men have suffered a bad press the world over.
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Shocked disbelief greets suggestions that many women may take pleasure in rape fantasies, established long ago by Nancy Friday in her pioneering 1973 study, My Secret Garden, and dramatized today by the staggering mass-market popularity of Harlequin Romances, where heroines are overwhelmed by passionate, impetuous men.
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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.
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Women are not in control of their bodies; nature is. Ancient mythology, with its sinister archetypes of vampire and Gorgon, is more accurate than feminism about the power and terror of female sexuality.
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Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first.
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Feminists had an astoundingly naive view of the mutual exclusiveness of sex and aggression, which, Freud demonstrates, are fused in the amoral unconscious, as revealed to us through dreams. That rape is simply what used to be called 'unbridled lust,' like gluttony a sin of insufficient self-restraint, seems to be beyond the feminist ken.
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Judaism’s campaign to make divinity invisible has never fully succeeded. Images are always eluding moral control, creating the brilliant western art tradition. Idolatry is fascism of the eye. The western eye will be served, with or without the consent of conscience.
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The only problem I have with computers and television is that when all cultures on earth reach the stage we are at it will lead to a kind of homogenization.
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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.
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It’s these guys in the Ivy League schools who get used to obeying women. They’re sedentary guys. It’s ironic that you’re getting the biggest bitching about men from the schools where the men are just eunuchs and bookworms.
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Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women.
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Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.
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I am reverential to great stars. I don't want sexual congress with them. The writer in me reveres the artist in them.
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Campus speech codes, that folly of the navel-gazing left, have increased the appeal of the right. Ideas must confront ideas. When hurt feelings and bruised egos are more important than the unfettered life of the mind, the universities have committed suicide.
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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.