Camille Paglia Quotes

“All roads from Rousseau lead to Sade.”

“All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics and politics were invented by men. But by the Promethean law of conflict and capture, woman has a right to seize what she will and vie with man on her own terms.”

“An erection is a thought and the org*sm an act of the imagination. The male has to will his sexual authority before the woman who is a shadow of his mother and of all women. Failure and humiliation constantly wait in the wings. No woman has to prove herself a woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man. He must perform, or the show does not go on. Social convention is irrelevant. A flop is a flop.”

“At some level, all love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts.”

“Beauty is our escape from the murky flesh-envelope that imprisons us.”

“Capitalism is an art form.”

“Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.”

“Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.”

“Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature.”

“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.”

“Liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother.”

“Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.”

“Metaphorically, every v*gina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered. The basic mechanics of conception require action in the male but nothing more than passive receptivity in the female.”

“Nature is always pulling the rug out from under our pompous ideals.”

“Nature is forever playing solitaire with herself.”

“Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son.”

“Science is a method of logical analysis of nature’s operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature’s forces, and their frequent predictability. But science is always playing catch-up ball. Nature breaks its own rules whenever it wants. Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt.”

“Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood.”

“Sex is power.”

“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.”

“Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature.”

“The book of Genesis is a male declaration of independence from the ancient mother-cults.”

“The Devil is a woman.”

“The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it.”

“The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an org*sm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery surrounds women’s sexuality. This mystery is the main reason for the imprisonment man has imposed on women. Only by confining his wife in a locked harem guarded by eunuchs could he be certain that her son was also his.”

“The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.”

“The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.”

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

“Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son.”

“We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force. Nature has a master agenda we can only dimly know.”