Camille Paglia Quotes

This is America, and we don't restrict our battles over people's sex lives to 11 months a year

All thoughtful persons perceive that the ideas of the morality of sexual relations upheld by the religions and laws of the Western nations are in our time undergoing a radical transformation.

A free people, free to believe as we wish, free to speak our minds, free to raise our children as we see fit, will, make no mistake about it, endure.

In America, sex is preached; in France, it is done.

Managing people's sex lives is something that I don't think is a good role for government.

I put sex in the Civil Rights Act.

I hold this project to be totally subversive of the last remains of English liberty …. Can it be pretended, that by the knowledge of our number, or our wealth, either can be increased?" And what purpose will it answer to know where the kingdom is crowded, and where it is thin, except we are to be driven from place to place as graziers do their cattle? If this be intended, let them brand us at once; but while they treat us like oxen and sheep, let them not insult us with the name of men

In a free society a large degree of human activity is none of the government's business. We should make criminal what's going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.

Women today should have the same rights as men. And all citizens should have the right to speak their minds without fear of imprisonment.

True liberal government is founded on the emancipation of men.

We can't police the way people express their sexuality.

The urge to push the concept of sex and sexuality into the fringes of the human experience is so bizarre to me.

I'm all about freedom to go ahead and practice whatever kind of religions you want, have whatever sort of sexual preference you want, freedom in terms of being pro choice for women.

Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices - taking advantage of our freedom of speech - who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.

Liberalism is the transformation of mankind into cattle.

But our society - unlike most in the world - presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas. That is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is this article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world.

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

Many women, particularly young women, have claimed the right to use the most explicit sex terms, including extremely vulgar ones, in public as well as private. But it is men, far more than women, who have been liberated by this change. For now that women use these terms, men no longer need to watch their own language in the presence of women. But is this a gain for women?

We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

I think there's so much that's not said about sex in the United States. Even from an educational level. And I do a lot of work on human trafficking and I connect a lot with girls that come up and end up in this trade and partially because of a lack of education about sex in the country.

A free society is regarded as one that does not engage, on principle, in attempting to control what people find meaningful, and a totalitarian society is regarded as one that does, on principle, attempt such control.

The guarantees of civil liberty are but guarantees of freedom of the human mind and spirit and of reasonable freedom and opportunity to express them...The very essence of the liberty which they guarantee is the freedom of the individual from compulsion as to what he shall think and what he shall say...

I suggested that sex was not the enemy, that violence was the enemy, that nice girls like sex.

However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free.

It's so acceptably easy for a woman not to strive too hard, not to be too adventure-crazed, not to take too many risks, not to enjoy sex with full candor ... It isn't seemly for a woman to have that much zest.