Quotes by Camille Paglia

• Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.
• My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm - as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.
• My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.
• Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.
• Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.
• Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.
• 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.
• 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.
• If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis.
• Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.
• I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.
• And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the "mob" - a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.
• Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.
• 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.
• Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?
• Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.
• All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!
• If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.
• You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered.
• 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.
• Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman's attention.
• Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.
• There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
• When anything goes, it's women who lose.
• The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they're dead is the nasty things I've said about them.
• 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.
• Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.
• The airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan - it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.
• 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.
• Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.
• Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.
• 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.
• Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!
• 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.
• The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair.