Top 60 Camille Paglia Quotes

I believe that government should confine itself to the public realm and that it should be as stripped down as possible, within reason. It should not be burdened by excess bureaucracy.

Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English – the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.

I don’t like reality shows and have never watched them, but I’m addicted to ‘Real Housewives’ because it’s authentic old-time soap opera reborn!

I have a long view of history – my orientation is archaeological because I’m always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt.

Daytime soap operas, which I used to adore, have been declining in quality and importance for over a decade, and I gradually stopped monitoring them.

I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions – which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.

Madonna can still produce a catchy pop song, but she hasn’t expanded her artistic vocabulary since the 1990s. Her concerts are glitzy extravaganzas of special effects overkill. She leaves little space in them for emotional depth or unscripted rapport with the audience.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don’t do things like that anymore – tracking words down to their roots.

I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society’s care.

Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.

Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!

I don’t go to New York. I don’t go to parties. I just do my business and study nature. My career is 28 years in an obscure art school, with limited staff and no perks. All I am is a teacher.

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

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

Bravo’s ‘Real Housewives’ series isn’t just entertainment for devoted fans like me – it’s an entire all-absorbing universe of pride and passion.

Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama’s Waterloo.

I love the Web, but the basis of my work is going through the physical books. When you go to the library, you see other books around on the shelves that you never knew existed. You can flip through a book and see the whole outline of it.

I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters.

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

Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan’s bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

I’m worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are being funneled through the cookie-cutter Ivy League and other elite schools and emerging with this callow anti-American, anti-military cast to their thinking.

As a registered Democrat, I am praying for a credible presidential candidate to emerge from the younger tier of politicians in their late 40s. A governor with executive experience would be ideal.

Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends.

I consider myself not a conservative libertarian but a radical ’60s libertarian.

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.

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

One of the main reasons I am so drawn to Hitchcock is that he planned his shots way in advance on story-boards, which he designed like classic paintings (he was an art connoisseur). It’s why he found shooting on set boring – because he had already composed the film in his head.

Although I’m an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised.

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.

Sotomayor’s vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as ‘a wise Latina’ trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment – a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism.

Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders.

Christianity began as a religion of the poor and dispossessed – farmers, fishermen, Bedouin shepherds. There’s a great lure to that kind of simplicity and rigor – the discipline, the call to action.

I’ve always felt that the obligation of teachers is to have a huge, broad overview and to provide a foundation course to the students. The long view of history is absolutely crucial.

The moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate – which is why Mitt Romney’s political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave.

Ever since Romanticism, an oppositional mode, artists have the right, and indeed the duty, to attack social convention. But it is ridiculous and in fact self-infantilizing for them to expect to be financially supported by the general public whom they are insulting.

The reason I was angry all the time was that Gloria Steinem and all those people, without reading my work, were saying all these horrible things against me.

Working moms commonly testify that they feel guilty when they are away from their children and guilty when they are not at their jobs. Devoted fathers certainly miss their children deeply, but it does not seem to be with the same gnawing, primal anxiety that often afflicts women.

As a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that, a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz’s spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time.

I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America’s most original and courageous political analysts. He has the true 1960s spirit – audacious and irreverent, yet passionately engaged and committed to social change.

I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels.

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

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.

My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren’t created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

I regard affirmative action as pernicious – a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.

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

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

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

Nature, I have constantly argued in my work, is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is the ultimate disposer of human fate, randomly recarving geography over 10,000-year epochs.

I guess I’m just a natural warrior.

If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn’t repel them.