Quotes from Camille Paglia

The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.

Charisma is the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality. It flows outward from a simplicity or unity of being and a composure and controlled vitality. There is gracious accommodation, yet commanding impersonality. 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.

Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.

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.

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

We must accept our pain Change what we can and laugh at the rest

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.

My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.

Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.

My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself We need more dissent and less dogma.

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.

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.

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.

A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men.

For all the feminist jabber about women being victimized by fashion, it is men who most suffer from conventions of dress. Every day, a woman can choose from an army of personae, femme to butch, and can cut or curl her hair or adorn herself with a staggering variety of artistic aids. But despite the Sixties experiments in peacock dress, no man can rise in the corporate world today, outside the entertainment industry, with long hair or makeup or purple velvet suits.

Nature is always pulling the rug out from under our pompous ideals.

Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.

Old school feminism, coveting social power, is blind to woman's cosmic sexual power.

Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.

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

Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.

Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.

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.