Camille Paglia Quotes

Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.

Women are the victims of this patriarchal culture, but they are also its carriers. Let us keep in mind that every oppressive man was raised in the confines of his mother's home.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.

I read [The Women's Room] in my 20s, and I was like, "I understand this now." And now I've become a mom and read it again and truly understand on a different level what one of the main characters goes through as a mother.

Perhaps a reign of powerful women is necessary to make, or unmake when need be, powerful men. Women would not waste so readily and uselessly the lives they had such care and pain in bearing. Why should they submit to the massacre of the innocent, one generation after another ... and allow them to be brought up as live-stock for the inevitable killing?

Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.

For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father's business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains.

You can't marry boys and expect them to be men - and you can't massage them into being men.

Men and boys, we show our manhood through the way we treat our women. Our wives, our sisters, our mothers.

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.

I never saw a ­distinction between a man and a woman. My ­grandparents and my mother were great examples of men and women, and they taught me ­equality. So I would fight with boys and wear my cousin's clothes. I would do whatever I wanted, and that's where I still stand today.

If the religious leaders have influence, they will not permit girls and boys to wrestle together, as recently happened in Shiraz.

I am sure that all people know deep down inside that the little child in the mother's womb is a human being from the moment of conception, created in the image of God to love and be loved. Let us pray that nobody will be afraid to protect that little child, to help that little child to be born. Jesus said: 'If you receive a little child in my name, you receive me.'

It is a human circumstance that when we are born we have not yet come into existence. We are lured into our special human existence by a mothering presence that gratifies our innate urges to be suckled, held, rocked, caressed. But that same gratifying presence puts limits on desire and rations satisfaction. In this sense the mother is also the first lawgiver.

Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.

Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength - in search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values - or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be - to be through her son, to live through her son.

Freud: If it's not one thing, it's your mother

A pittifull mother makes a scald head.

You've got your mother in a whirl, she's not sure if your a boy or a girl.

As women go, so goes civilization.

You show me a boy who brings a snake home to his mother and I'll show you an orphan.

I have seen something of this world," she said over the trays, "and there are but two sorts of women in it-- those who take the strength out of a man, and those who put it back. Once I was that one, and now I am this.