Camille Paglia Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.

  Camille Paglia

  Love, Art, Self

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae”, p.51, Yale University Press

• The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture

  Camille Paglia

  Nature, Men, Feminist

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.18, Vintage

• 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!

  Camille Paglia

  Voice, Talking, History

• Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Males, Western Culture

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

• Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Sex, Eye

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

• Sex IS power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live.

  Camille Paglia

  Sex, Order, Identity

  Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.28, Canongate Books

• 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.

  Camille Paglia

  Media, America, Impact

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.9, Vintage

• I'm a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I'm an evangelist of popular culture, but when there's only media, then there's going to be a slow debasement of language, and that's what I think we're fighting.

  Camille Paglia

  Fighting, Thinking, Media

  "Warrior for the word". Interview with Kerry Lauerman, www.salon.com. April 07, 2005.

• Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was sill scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!

  Camille Paglia

  Grandmother, Clothes, Feminist

  "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality". Camille Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, 1994.

• Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Thinking, Sight

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.210, Vintage

• The capitalist distribution network, a complex chain of factory, transport, warehouse and retail outlet, is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture.

  Camille Paglia

  Accomplishment, Males, Retail

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae”, p.56, Yale University Press

• Hollywood, America's greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, America, Mind

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.11, Vintage

• Judeo-Christians have got to respect the pagan truth shown in the popular culture of sex and violence. It's meaningful about the elemental forces of life, the brutality of life and nature.

  Camille Paglia

  Christian, Meaningful, Sex

• I sometimes call my new system 'Italian pagan Catholicism,' but it could more accurately be called 'pragmatic liberalism,' with roots in Enlightenment political philosophy. It is a synthesis of the enduring dual elements in our culture, pagan and Judeo-Christian, Romantic and Classic.

  Camille Paglia

  Christian, Philosophy, Italian

• Popular culture - above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R & B roots - did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader.

  Camille Paglia

  Roots, Rocks, Feminist

• Butterfield 8, with its call-girl heroine working her way down the alphabet of men from Amherst to Yale, appeared at a very formative moment in my adolescence and impressed me forever with the persona of the prostitute, whom I continue to revere. The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture.

  Camille Paglia

  Girl, Men, Yale

• Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the "best" American higher criticism.

  Camille Paglia

  Christian, Art, Epic

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Arion, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

• Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men's tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.

  Camille Paglia

  Men, Lust, Survival

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae”, p.42, Yale University Press

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