Time & Perspective Quote by Camille Paglia

Paglia is picking a fight with two orthodoxies at once: the academic suspicion that history is just chaos in retrospect, and the left-to-right habit of pretending impersonal “forces” do all the real work. By insisting that history has “shape, order, and meaning,” she’s defending narrative itself as more than a comforting lie - a deliberately unfashionable stance in a late-20th-century humanities culture trained to distrust grand arcs and teleology.

The middle clause is the pressure point. “Exceptional men” is not a neutral phrase; it’s bait. Paglia is staking out a provocative version of human agency that flirts with the “great man” theory precisely because it irritates structural explanations that flatten individuals into symptoms of class, capital, or discourse. She hedges (“as much as economic forces”) to avoid sounding like a pure romantic, but the emphasis is clear: genius, will, appetite, charisma - these are historical engines, not decorative myths.

Then she resurrects the supposedly embarrassing words: “beauty, nobility, and greatness.” Calling them “passe abstractions” concedes the critique - that such terms are culturally constructed, sometimes weaponized, often exclusionary. Her twist is that their meanings can shift without collapsing into emptiness. That’s the subtext: relativism is not the same thing as nihilism. Paglia’s intent is cultural counter-programming: a push to restore aesthetic and moral ambition inside institutions that have made suspicion their default mode. The line is less nostalgia than a demand that we keep judging, even after we’ve learned how judgment gets made.