Camille Paglia Quotes

Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man.

Civilisation is a conspiracy.

Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast; and this fallen world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wilderness.

I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man; it is we.

Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

I think that monogamy is artificial. I do not think it's something that comes naturally to us.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

Without game, men prey on each other.

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.

I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.

As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.

I used to think that capitalism was human nature, but it isn’t at all. It’s culture. The same is true of democracy/

The philosophers, who have inquired into the foundations of society, have all felt the necessity of going back to a state of nature; but not one of them has got there.

Man is not made for society, but society is made for man.

I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by evolution than anything else.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

So much of the language that surrounds us - from things like economics, management theory, and the algorithms built into computer systems - appears to be objective and neutral. But in fact, it is loaded with powerful, and very debatable, political assumptions about how society should work and what human beings are really like.

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

Everyone is a little bitter. We're born bitter. The personality itself is really just a very complex defense mechanism. A reaction to the first time someone said, "No you can't.

The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.

What is often being argued, it seems to me, in the idea of nature is the idea of man; and this not only generally, or in ultimate ways, but the idea of man in society, indeed the ideas of kinds of societies.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

Religion is civilization, the highest.