The 37 Most Interesting Camille Paglia Quotes Of All Time

The avant-garde was a magnificent and revolutionary phase in the history of art, but it’s completely over. Artists and galleries must (in Ann Landers’ immortal words) wake up and smell the coffee!

I must confess that I find very little of interest in too-formulaic contemporary pornography — except for the always hot gay-male scenarios that one stumbles on in surfing the Web.

Taylor Swift is the third rail of American culture.

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman’s attention.

I detested “The Beauty Myth” because I felt it was such a poorly researched and argued book. To address the topic of beauty required research into aesthetics and the history of modern media and Hollywood. But she just waded into the subject with the most PC second-wave feminist ideology — even though she herself was profiting enormously from her own good looks. If Naomi Wolf didn’t look the way she did, she would never have gotten any attention for that book. So it seemed hypocritical of her to be denouncing the beauty myth even while she was profiting from it.

If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.

Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour?

You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex.

I can’t stand the bad lighting, tinny voices, snarky scripts and fake cool of today’s (reality) TV shows.

For two years, I have spent an irritating amount of time trying to avoid Gaga’s catchy but depthless hits.

It is woman’s destiny to rule men. Not to serve them, flatter them, or hang on them for guidance.

My problem is that I do not get along with lesbians at all. They don’t like me, and I don’t like them.

Whoever is doing the photography and editing for “Real Housewives of New Jersey” and also for “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and “Real Housewives of Orange County” — this is absolutely cutting edge. I can watch the same episode — while I’m cooking and eating dinner – five, six, or seven times. I savor how visually interesting they are — how long each shot lasts and how much information it contains. This is intelligent and sophisticated documentary filmmaking that really needs to be honored.

Eat dirt, you sour Clintons, who said Obama was “unelectable.”

And let me take this opportunity to say that of all the innumerable print and broadcast journalists who have interviewed me in the U.S. and abroad since I arrived on the scene nearly 20 years ago, Katie Couric was definitively the stupidest.

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

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.

Everything that calls itself avant-garde today is just a tedious imitation of earlier and far superior modernist art.

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.

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

Straight men who visit prostitutes are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family–in other words, from society, religion, and procreative Mother Nature.

The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they’re dead are the nasty things I’ve said about them.

Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.

I am of course delighted that the fanatical puritan feminists of the anti-pornography crusade of the 1980s have been forced to eat dirt! Their arrogant success in pushing Playboy and Penthouse out of the convenience stores (a campaign where they allied with conservative Christian groups) evaporated when the Web went big in the ‘90s.

Pursuit and seduction are part of sexuality. It’s part of the sizzle.

Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improvisor. His parables are great one-liners.

Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.

Pornography is now beyond anyone’s control. It’s a classic example of ever-controversial unregulated capitalism — the market automatically responding to individual needs and desires. I continue to support and defend pornography, which I believe exposes the deepest, darkest truths about sexuality.

We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsolin g mysteries. The feminist of the fin de siècle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way.

A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with a ll their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.

Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.

How sickeningly debased our politics have become that this jabbering cartoon weasel (Anthony Weiner) could be taken seriously for a second as a candidate for mayor of New York…The compulsion to exhibit and boast about one’s penis is embarrassingly infantile — the obvious residue of some squalid family psychodrama in childhood that is now being replayed in public.

Foucault, Foucault, Foucault — a con artist who will one day be a mere footnote in the bulging chronicle of academic follies.

It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton (born the same year as me) is our party’s best chance. She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train.

People who can’t see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism — the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

In this tight job market, young scholars are in a terrible bind. They have to cater to and flatter the academic establishment if they hope to survive.

Oh, feminism is still alive?