The Devil Is A Woman: 100 Powerful Quotes From The Always Controversial Camille Paglia
1.
The Devil is a woman.
2.
Sex is power.
3.
If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.
4.
It’s a terrible age now where young people will only read books that they already agree with.
5.
Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents.
6.
Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their evil look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it.
7.
It is woman’s destiny to rule men. Not to serve them, flatter them, or hang on them for guidance. Nor to insult them, demean them, or stereotype them as oppressors.
8.
What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear.
9.
Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.
10.
Guess what–women are different than men! When will feminism wake up to this basic reality?
11.
Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.
12.
In the real world, very smart people fail and mediocre people rise. Part of what makes people fail or succeed are skills that have nothing to do with IQ.
13.
Feminism, coveting social power, is blind to women’s cosmic sexual power.
14.
The Sixties attempted a return to nature that ended in disaster.
15.
The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they’re dead is the nasty things I’ve said about them.
16.
Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.
17.
Academic Marxism is a fantasy world, and unctuous compassion-sweepstakes, into which real workers or peasants never penetrate.
18.
I’m sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.
19.
I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man’s greatest idea.
20.
When I meet gay men anywhere in the world, there is a spontaneity and a spirit of fun and mischief that lesbians seem incapable of.
21.
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.
22.
It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal.
23.
The femme fatale is for real.
24.
I’m saying that men go from control by their mothers to control by their wives,
and this is the horror of men’s lives. And feminism refuses to see this.
and this is the horror of men’s lives. And feminism refuses to see this.
25.
Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son.
26.
Nature is always pulling the rug out from under our pompous ideals.
27.
I find it completely hypocritical for people in academe or the media to demand understanding of Muslim beliefs and yet be so derisive and dismissive of the devout Christian beliefs of Southern conservatives.
28.
The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.
29.
A woman simply is, but a man must become.
30.
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.
31.
I despise snark. Snark is a disease that started with David Letterman and jumped to Jon Stewart and has proliferated since. I think it’s horrible for young people!
32.
Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son.
33.
In today’s impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called “conservative,” as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives.
34.
Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America.
35.
Our politicians, like our comedians, have been boring us with their canned formulas for way too long. So that’s why Donald Trump has suddenly leapt in the polls. He’s a great stand-up comedian. He’s anti-PC–he’s not afraid to say things that are rude and mean. I think he’s doing a great service for comedy as well as for politics!
36.
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.
37.
Incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name.
38.
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.
39.
Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel.
40.
Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love.
41.
We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. “I’m this way because my father made me this way. I’m this way because my husband made me this way.” Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.
42.
I call it mattress feminism. Perpetually lugging around your bad memories–never evolving or moving on! It’s like a parody of the worst aspects of that kind of grievance-oriented feminism. I called my feminism Amazon feminism or street-smart feminism, where you remain vigilant, learn how to defend yourself, and take responsibility for the choices you make.
43.
What troubles me about the hostile workplace category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women.
44.
I had crushes on women—actually I loved charismatic, extreme people, women or men. By high school I was saying I must be a lesbian, because if you are attracted to women, you’re a lesbian. I was also attracted to men, but I didn’t get along with men.
45.
Every male copulating with a woman returns to his origins in the womb. Goethe postponed intercourse until he was forty. This must be related to his self-imposed distance from his forceful mother. To refuse phallic penetration is to refuse surrender to the female matrix.
46.
[W]omen will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality.
47.
I am popular with certain people, but I’m still blocked out of the establishment. I hate that incestuous world. It makes me sick. It’s impossible for anything truly original to get done. Thinking is not allowed. It’s all PC. It is so horrible because it is a fossilized, parasitic version of Sixties philosophy.
48.
The male orgasm is short-lived and transient—and that’s the irony of men’s sexuality. It’s ironic that feminism looks at the penis as power and violence when in fact it is very weak.
49.
It’s these guys in the Ivy League schools who get used to obeying women. They’re sedentary guys. It’s ironic that you’re getting the biggest bitching about men from the schools where the men are just eunuchs and bookworms.
50.
Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.
51.
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.
52.
Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness. The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.
53.
Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.
54.
What women have to realize is their own dominance as a sex. That women’s sexual powers are enormous. All cultures have seen it. Men know it. Women know it. The only people who don’t know it are feminists.
55.
Metaphorically, every vagina 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.
56.
Women’s studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink. It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women.
57.
Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.
58.
I hate dogma in any form. I hated it in the Catholic Church and Girl Scout troops of the 1950s, and I hate in in gay activism and established feminism today.
59.
What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.
60.
Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It’s part of the sizzle.
61.
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.
62.
Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman’s attention.
63.
Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.
64.
With their propagandistic frame of mind, feminist leaders never admitted that their opponents could be equally motivated by ethics.
65.
Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improviser. His parables are great one-liners.
66.
Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him.
67.
What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization but an international conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men’s own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.
68.
Campus speech codes, that folly of the navel-gazing left, have increased the appeal of the right. Ideas must confront ideas. When hurt feelings and bruised egos are more important than the unfettered life of the mind, the universities have committed suicide.
69.
The gargantuan promiscuity of the Seventies gay male world was a pagan phenomenon, unequaled in scale since the Roman empire.
70.
Nature is a Darwinian spectacle of the eaters and the eaten.
71.
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.
72.
Every man harbors an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free.
73.
Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?
74.
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.
75.
Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature.
76.
Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.
77.
Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.
78.
I’m absolutely a feminist. The reason other feminists don’t like me is that I criticize the movement, explaining that it needs a correction. Feminism has betrayed women, alienated men and women, replaced dialogue with political correctness.
79.
Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.
80.
When I was a child, my father taught me to put up my fists like a boy and to be prepared to defend myself at all times.
81.
Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaver-like tunneling to the top.
82.
And whereas touching is sexual harassment, speech is not. I am militant on this. Words must remain free.
83.
There is nothing in kids’ education anymore that tells them to revere anything.
84.
When anything goes, it’s women who lose.
85.
The fact is, you get great art only from mutilated egos. Only mutilated egos are obsessive enough.
86.
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!
87.
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.
88.
Feminism is dead. The movement is absolutely dead. The women’s movement tried to suppress dissident voices for way too long. There’s no room for dissent.
89.
Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.
90.
Leftism should be about the people. That’s how it began.
91.
You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered.
92.
I want young women when they’re 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives.
93.
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.
94.
My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.
95.
There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
96.
We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first.
97.
I see far stronger and more charismatic personalities strolling around Philadelphia’s neighborhoods than are being featured in most of today’s bland daytime soaps.
98.
Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It’s an illusion. Men are pussy-whipped. And they know it. That’s what the strip clubs are about; not woman as victim, not woman as slave, but woman as goddess.
99.
Let’s get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.
100.
When it defines man as the enemy, feminism is alienating women from their own bodies.