Camille Paglia: Trending quotes (page 16)

“He was a revealing symbol. He called himself passive-aggressive. There was self-pity, whining. There was a diminishment, a diminution. He was sitting there in his sweater, hunched over his guitar, looking like a little lost boy. Compare that with the great figures of my generation: Jimi Hendrix. Pete Townshend. Keith Richards.”

Camille Paglia

On Kurt Cobain
Playboy interview (May 1995)

Boy

“Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 203

History

“I’ve watched therapy getting more and more mushy in the past fifteen years in America…. It’s become what I call coercive compassion. It’s disgusting, it’s condescending, it’s insulting, it’s coddling, it keeps everyone in an infantile condition rather than in the adult condition that was the ultimate goal of Freudian analysis.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), The Rape Debate, Continued, p. 61

Past

“Freud says, “Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling.” Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 27

Fear , Boy , Nature , Fight

“In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 12

War

“Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 1

Nature , Change

“Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects governments to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother. Feminism has inherited these contradictions.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 3

Freedom , Suffering

“The Seventies theory explosion [i. e., Literary theory, deconstruction, etc. ] was a panic reaction by headlocked pedants unable to cope with the emotional and sensory flux of the Sixties. It was a desperate search for new authority, new dogma.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 218

Search

“Beware of the manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern. And don’t look for sexual enlightenment from academe, which spews out mountains of books but never looks at life directly.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Rape and Modern Sex War, p. 53

Love , Life , Books , Mountain

“The Sixties attempted a return to nature that ended in disaster.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 216

Nature

“At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father’s business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 89

Search , Business , Adulthood

“I think it is one of the greatest pictures ever taken of a woman.”

Camille Paglia

On Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Patti Smith on the cover of Smith’s debut album Horses (1975), p. 45
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

Thinking

“In 'A Room of One's Own', Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalog of the British Museum: why, she asks, are there so many books written by men about women but none by women about men? The answer to her question is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman's dominance.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 295

Women , Men , Books , Question

“The Devil is a woman.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 11

“Ten thousand years ago, when man the nomad took root in one place, he brought animals with him into human service. But domestication was to be his fate too, as he fell under architecturally reinforced female control.”

Camille Paglia

pg. 8
The Birds

Animals , Fate

“Hitchcock finds women captivating but dangerous. She allures by nature but she is chief artificer in civilisation, a magic fabricator of persona whose very smile is an arc of deception.”

Camille Paglia

Source: The Birds, p. 7

Smile , Women , Nature

“In a media age where books are no longer the primary medium for information storage and exchange, language must be reclaimed from the hucksters and the pedants and imaginatively reinforced. To save literature, educators must take command of the pre-rational world of images. The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.”

Camille Paglia

The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age (2004)

Imagination , Books , Literature , Age

“Because boys lack a biological marker like menstruation, to be man is to be not female.”

Camille Paglia

Contemporary feminism called this "misogyny," but it was wrong. Masculine identity is embattled and fragile. In the absence of opportunity for heroic physical action, as in the modern office world, women's goodwill is crucial for preserving the male ego, which requires, alas, daily maintenance. It is in the best interests of the human race, and of women themselves, for men to be strong.
Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 85

Boy

“Films of the mating behavior of most other species — a staple of public television of America — demonstrate that the female chooses.”

Camille Paglia

Males pursue, show off, brawl, scuffle, and make general fools of themselves for love. A major failing of most feminist ideology is its dumb, ungenerous stereotyping of men as tyrants and abusers, when in fact — as I know full well from my own mortifying lesbian experience — men are tormented by women’s flirtatiousness and hemming and hawing, their manipulations and changeableness, their humiliating rejections. Cock teasing is a universal reality. It is part of women’s merciless testing and cold-eyed comparison shopping for potential mates. Men will do anything to win the favor of women.
Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 35

Behavior

“Foucault is the Cagliostro of our time.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 224

Time