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Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

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
Defines
Quests
Quest
Species
Meaning
Reading
Doe
Absolve
Every
Partial

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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Because of my own family's service (in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Massachusetts and New York National Guard), I am a strong supporter of the military and do believe that there are just wars.
Camille Paglia
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We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.
Camille Paglia
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The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.
Camille Paglia
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A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.
Camille Paglia
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You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered.
Camille Paglia
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I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I'm sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.
Camille Paglia
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The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.
Camille Paglia
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The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.
Camille Paglia
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No one is born gay. The idea is ridiculous, but it is symptomatic of our overpoliticized climate that such assertions are given instant credence by gay activists and their media partisans. I think what gay men are remembering is that they were born different.
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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Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America.
Camille Paglia
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In sex, man is driven into the very abyss which he flees. He makes a voyage to non-being and back.
Camille Paglia
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There's something retro about your persona. It's like the pre-World War II generation of reporters - those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they've all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds - utterly dull and insipid.
Camille Paglia
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What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.
Camille Paglia
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All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!
Camille Paglia
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Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him.
Camille Paglia
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The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.
Camille Paglia
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Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son.
Camille Paglia
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Not since the Black Panthers sailed into their Upper East Side tea party has there been so daffy an exercise in radical chic.
Camille Paglia
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Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.
Camille Paglia