Camille Paglia Quotes

It is idle to talk of civil liberties to adults who were systematically taught in adolescence that they had none; and it is sheer hypocrisy to call such people freedom loving.

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights ... at the school house door.

Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school.

School is basically about one point of view - the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view.

I think schools, as they are now regulated, the hot-beds of vice and folly, and the knowledge of human nature supposedly attained there, merely cunning selfishness.

Man and fascism cannot co-exist. If fascism conquers, man will cease to exist and there will remain only man-like creatures that have undergone an internal transformation. But if man, man who is endowed with reason and kindness, should conquer, then Fascism must perish, and those who have submitted to it will once again become people.

The whole intelectual culture has a filtering system, starts as a child in school. You're expected to accept certain beliefs, styles, behavioral patterns and so on. If you don't accept them, you are called maybe a behavioral problem, or something, and you're weeded out. Something like that goes on all the way through universities and graduate schools. There is an implicit system of filtering, which has the, it creates a strong tendency to impose conformism. Now, it's a tendency, so you do have exceptions, and sometimes the exceptions are quite striking.

It is foolish for people to think they can align themselves and be safe in a police state.

For digital natives, public schools are jails

The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.

Hard to remember who is more dangerous: the people who are attacking our liberties overseas, or those who are suppressing them at home.

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

In this time when a citizenry applauds the liberation of a country as it lives in fear of its own freedom, when people all over the country fear reprisal if they use their right to free speech, it is time to get angry. It is time to get fierce.

The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

It is obvious to any observer that in every western country the increase of importance of public schools has been at least coincident with the relaxation of older family ties.

I taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the school board to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they always had other fish to fry. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything, but blind obedience.

Almost everyone today is brain-damaged by our education which is designed to produce docile automatons.

Tyranny and anarchy are alike incompatible with freedom, security, and the enjoyment of opportunity.

Christianity is the enemy of liberty and civilization. It has kept mankind in slavery and oppression. The Church and the State have always fraternally united to exploit the people.

Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people

All kids, I think, are creative, but they get it pounded out of them in school.

Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach.

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.

Any kind of dictatorship, I'm uneasy. I just don't like dictators. I don't like crowds. I don't like hordes, and I don't like other people telling me what to do. This is probably a reaction against people telling me what to do when I was a kid. I won't join any group, espouse a cause against some other people.

A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.