Camille Paglia Quotations

Camille Paglia

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.

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.

Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.

Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their "evil" look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it.

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.

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

Rigid social constructionism so remains the dominant dogma in American humanities and social-sciences that to question it even an iota brings the thought police out in shrieking mobs to your door.

Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.

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

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

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