Camille Anna Paglia quote: "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."

There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around. Even the bomb merely releases energy...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

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

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman'...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Pr...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is t...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family....
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types ...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to des...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet....
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Today, the ideal male is the gay man and the ideal female is the worker female, the woman who can wo...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revo...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, ...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, t...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

When anything goes, it's women who lose.
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her a...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Elizabeth Taylor is pre-feminist woman. This is the source of her continuing greatness and relevance...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking ru...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminis...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality. Every pregnant woman has bo...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improviser. His parables are great one-...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being arou...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and inte...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mat...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. ...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie pro...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion!
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against th...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually r...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of ...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Prostitution is not just a service industry, mopping up the overflow of male demand, which always ex...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men but rather their conqueror, an outlaw w...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private real...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not b...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

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

Sex is metaphysical for men, as it is not for women. Women have no problem to solve through sex. Phy...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperia...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excess...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restora...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

The best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art. The Nude is a beautifully...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, a...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a ...
CAMILLE ANNA PAGLIA

Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my s...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Now that virtually every career is an option for ambitious girls, it can no longer be considered reg...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopele...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

As a longtime fan of talk radio, I'm very worried about the low opinion that conservative hosts ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all ove...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

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

I am a very reclusive, private person.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Younger women have no problem in reconciling beauty with ambitions as a professional woman.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary ar...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

If feminism has receded in visibility and prestige, it is precisely because its vision of life's...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!
CAMILLE PAGLIA

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

Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion....
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman&...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

It is not true that I oppose government funding of the arts.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake f...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mat...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Video games and YouTube.com are creatively booming, even though Web design, as demonstrated by the u...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Bravo's 'Real Housewives' series isn't just entertainment for devoted fans like me -...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Madonna is her own Hollywood studio - a popelike mogul and divine superstar in one. She has a laserl...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

It's aggravating that Hollywood has never gotten credit for the role it played in promoting mode...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Working moms commonly testify that they feel guilty when they are away from their children and guilt...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Madonna remains the most visible performer on the planet, as well as one of the wealthiest, but woul...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I've been a longtime admirer of Condoleezza Rice, because I like her articulateness and style - ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they clai...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Te...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness an...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Madonna can still produce a catchy pop song, but she hasn't expanded her artistic vocabulary sin...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America's most origin...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in wome...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being arou...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Nature, I have constantly argued in my work, is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I have a long view of history - my orientation is archaeological because I'm always thinking in ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general pub...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on 'All My Children' when half the wo...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy a...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

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

I wonder why prostitution is illegal
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I'm worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angeli...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie F...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Pr...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revo...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, t...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not b...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Prostitution is not just a service industry, mopping up the overflow of male demand, which always ex...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

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

Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family....
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Christianity began as a religion of the poor and dispossessed - farmers, fishermen, Bedouin shepherd...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

No genuinely avant-garde artist should ever be on the government dole.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Daytime soap operas, which I used to adore, have been declining in quality and importance for over a...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way....
CAMILLE PAGLIA

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

The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against th...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

When I was a child, my father taught me to put up my fists like a boy and to be prepared to defend m...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Ever since Romanticism, an oppositional mode, artists have the right, and indeed the duty, to attack...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions - whi...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Uncritical American boosterism - automatic endorsement of every government action - is myopic and se...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

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

If you don't embrace the consensus, your career stops in its tracks. I had a woman call me from the ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I've been overusing my voice.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and inte...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Like Picasso. Because he was mean to his girlfriend, he was not a great artist?
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I don't remember the fat women. Can we leave the fat women out of this? Excuse me, I have to go to t...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

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

My problem is that I do not get along with lesbians at all. They don't like me, and I don't ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

'Mad Men' doesn't capture one single thing about the decor, costumes, or sexual interact...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Because of my own family's service (in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Massachusetts and New York Natio...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of publi...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

The plastic surgery issue is really looming because girls in the U.S. are getting it in their teens.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Lately, I've been doing a lot of tuning in and impatiently tuning out. As a longtime fan of talk...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

One of the main reasons I am so drawn to Hitchcock is that he planned his shots way in advance on st...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is t...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I don't like reality shows and have never watched them, but I'm addicted to 'Real Housew...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

The airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan - it's the rest of us guinea ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her a...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually r...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, a...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excess...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private real...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking ru...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

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

Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperia...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

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

In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet....
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation a...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Na...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his econo...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they're dead is the nasty things I've ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Elizabeth Taylor is pre-feminist woman. This is the source of her continuing greatness and relevance...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion!
CAMILLE PAGLIA

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to des...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restora...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nat...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminis...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forc...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being arou...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman'...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improviser. His parables are great one-...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men but rather their conqueror, an outlaw w...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I'm very pro-American - my entire family escaped poverty in Italy because they rightly believed ...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

As a registered Democrat, I am praying for a credible presidential candidate to emerge from the youn...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect w...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I am a registered Democrat who is determined to return my party to the proletarian principles of the...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alert...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay h...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

As a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that, a century from now, cultural his...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I've always felt that the obligation of teachers is to have a huge, broad overview and to provid...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I regard affirmative action as pernicious - a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but w...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I don't go to New York. I don't go to parties. I just do my business and study nature. My ca...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as 'a wise Latina' trumping white...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forc...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I remember turning 'The Sopranos' on once and within two minutes nearly throwing a brick thr...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I see far stronger and more charismatic personalities strolling around Philadelphia's neighborho...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual persona...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual wor...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed'...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

A woman simply is, but a man must become.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their n...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they're dead is the nasty things I...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

If colleges and universities are really concerned about women's rights, then they must adjust to...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

When anything goes, it's women who lose.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I'm a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I'm an evangelist of popular cul...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Feminism is dead. The movement is absolutely dead. The women's movement tried to suppress dissid...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I guess I'm just a natural warrior.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I believe that government should confine itself to the public realm and that it should be as strippe...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I consider myself not a conservative libertarian but a radical '60s libertarian.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Leftism should be about the people. That's how it began.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

The reason I was angry all the time was that Gloria Steinem and all those people, without reading my...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

A war still rages over the legacy of the 1960s.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Perhaps there is no greater issue facing contemporary women than the choices they must make about ba...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

I was the first to advocate the Web. But I am very troubled by this thing that every kid must have a...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Back in the 1960s, I got a superb education for very little money. The bill for my first year at Har...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Students are very gullible about the web. The only way you can really sort out information on the we...
CAMILLE PAGLIA

Popular culture - above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R & B roots - did f...
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.

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Camille Anna 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 Anna Paglia

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