Quotes by Camille Paglia with nature

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia

American academic and social critic

Lived from: 1947 -

Category: Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagUnited States

Born: 2 april 1947

  • The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.
  • American feminism's nose dive began when Kate Millet, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies.
  • The real butches are straight... dealing with and controlling men makes you stronger.
  • One of the most startling discoveries of my career was when I realized that the strongest women in the world are not lesbians but heterosexual women, who know how to handle men.
  • Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.
  • In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.
  • We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.
  • The venerable emeritus professors still at Yale when I entered graduate school may have been reserved, puritanical WASPs, but they were men of honor who had given their lives to scholarship. Today in the elite schools, honor and ethics are gone.
  • Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.
  • The gargantuan promiscuity of the Seventies gay male world was a pagan phenomenon, unequaled in scale since the Roman empire.
  • 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.
  • Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin.
  • Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son.
  • If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.
  • Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus, a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed.
  • Lesbian feminists, for all their ideals of sisterhood and solidarity, can treat each other with a fickleness, a parasitic exploitativeness, and vicious spite that have to be seen to be believed.
  • 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.
  • In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace.
  • The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men but rather their conqueror, an outlaw who controls the sexual channel between nature and culture.
  • We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, the site of our biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.
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  • Most of western culture is a distortion of reality. But reality should be distorted; that is, imaginatively amended. The Buddhist acquiescence to nature is neither accurate about nature nor just to human potential.
    Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
    ― Camille Paglia
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  • 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
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  • 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.
    ― Camille Paglia
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  • Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.
    Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
    ― Camille Paglia
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  • 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.
    Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
    ― Camille Paglia
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  • In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man.
    Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) Opening sentence, p. 1
    ― Camille Paglia
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  • Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.
    ― Camille Paglia
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  • Oil painting and color, said Michelangelo, are for women and the lazy. His sharp-edged Apollonian style is the only way to beat back mother nature.
    Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
    ― Camille Paglia
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  • 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
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  • Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.
    ― Camille Paglia
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  • Sade has barely made a dent on American academic consciousness. It is his violence far more than his sex which is so hard for liberals to accept. For Sade, sex is violence. Violence is the authentic spirit of mother nature.
    Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
    ― Camille Paglia
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  • 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.
    Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
    ― Camille Paglia
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  • The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood.
    Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
    ― Camille Paglia
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  • The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men but rather their conqueror, an outlaw who controls the sexual channel between nature and culture.
    ― Camille Paglia
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  • Woman's sexuality is disruptive of the dully mechanical workaday world, in which efficiency means uniformity. The problems of woman's entrance into the career system spring from more than male chauvinism. She brings nature into the social realm, which may be too small to contain it.
    Vamps and Tramps (1994)
    ― Camille Paglia
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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.
    Vamps and Tramps (1994)
    ― Camille Paglia
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What are the most famous quotes from Camille Paglia?

The two most famous quotes from Camille Paglia are:

  • "Most of western culture is a distortion of reality. But reality should be distorted; that is, imaginatively amended. The Buddhist acquiescence to nature is neither accurate about nature nor just to human potential."
  • "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."

When did Camille Paglia live?

Camille Paglia was born in 1947.