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Sex IS power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live.

Camille Paglia

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Camille Paglia
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: April 2
Art Historian
Essayist
Film Critic
Journalist
Literary Critic
Professor
Teacher
Writer
Endicott
New York
Camille Anna Paglia
Western
Identity
Sex
Everyone
Culture
Order
Power
Killed
Live
Relationships

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome.
Camille Paglia
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The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.'
Camille Paglia
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The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.
Camille Paglia
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I see far stronger and more charismatic personalities strolling around Philadelphia's neighborhoods than are being featured in most of today's bland daytime soaps.
Camille Paglia
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My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.
Camille Paglia
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There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.
Camille Paglia
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In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called conservative, as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives.
Camille Paglia
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Working moms commonly testify that they feel guilty when they are away from their children and guilty when they are not at their jobs. Devoted fathers certainly miss their children deeply, but it does not seem to be with the same gnawing, primal anxiety that often afflicts women.
Camille Paglia
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Heterosexual love,. is in sync with cosmic forces. Not everyone has the stomach for daily war with nature.
Camille Paglia
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In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.
Camille Paglia
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Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.
Camille Paglia
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I sometimes call my new system 'Italian pagan Catholicism,' but it could more accurately be called 'pragmatic liberalism,' with roots in Enlightenment political philosophy. It is a synthesis of the enduring dual elements in our culture, pagan and Judeo-Christian, Romantic and Classic.
Camille Paglia
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Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its puerile, paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex.
Camille Paglia
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If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct -- unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where women clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers.
Camille Paglia
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Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.
Camille Paglia
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Daytime soap operas, which I used to adore, have been declining in quality and importance for over a decade, and I gradually stopped monitoring them.
Camille Paglia
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Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their ''evil'' look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it
Camille Paglia
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Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind.
Camille Paglia
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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.
Camille Paglia
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Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.
Camille Paglia