I want young women when they’re 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives. – Camille Paglia
American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation. – Camille Paglia
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. – Camille Paglia
I’m very pro-American – my entire family escaped poverty in Italy because they rightly believed in the American dream. – Camille Paglia
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. – Camille Paglia
It’s high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell’s soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned. – Camille Paglia
You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered. – Camille Paglia
Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it’s grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map. – Camille Paglia
Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up. – Camille Paglia
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. – Camille Paglia
A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on ‘All My Children’ when half the women actors, young and old, seem to be afflicted by android Barbie creep. All those thick swatches of lifeless strands clustering lankly round ladies’ necks! Like orange tanning spray, this is a fashion fad that should be put out of its misery. – Camille Paglia
I’ve been a longtime admirer of Condoleezza Rice, because I like her articulateness and style – her toughness and rigor. – Camille Paglia
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. – Camille Paglia
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. – Camille Paglia
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. – Camille Paglia
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. – Camille Paglia
Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman’s attention. – Camille Paglia
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. – Camille Paglia
Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions? – Camille Paglia
Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it. – Camille Paglia
If feminism has receded in visibility and prestige, it is precisely because its vision of life’s goals and rewards has become too narrow and elitist. – Camille Paglia
Perhaps there is no greater issue facing contemporary women than the choices they must make about balancing home and work. – Camille Paglia
My grandfather worked in a shoe factory – he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family. – Camille Paglia
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
I am a registered Democrat who is determined to return my party to the proletarian principles of the Franklin D. Roosevelt era. – Camille Paglia
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. – Camille Paglia
Video games and YouTube.com are creatively booming, even though Web design, as demonstrated by the ugly clutter of most major news sites, is in the pits. – Camille Paglia