Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Would
Male
Males
Exist
Learned
Perverse
Art
Visionary
Form
Visionaries
Doe
Lesbian
Mind
Idealism

More quotes by Camille Paglia

Image
I'm a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I'm an evangelist of popular culture, but when there's only media, then there's going to be a slow debasement of language, and that's what I think we're fighting.
Camille Paglia
Image
Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.
Camille Paglia
Image
The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.
Camille Paglia
Image
There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
Camille Paglia
Image
Sex IS power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live.
Camille Paglia
Image
Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?
Camille Paglia
Image
The moment there is imagination there is myth
Camille Paglia
Image
A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on 'All My Children' when half the women actors, young and old, seem to be afflicted by android Barbie creep. All those thick swatches of lifeless strands clustering lankly round ladies' necks! Like orange tanning spray, this is a fashion fad that should be put out of its misery.
Camille Paglia
Image
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
Image
I view the prostitute as one of the few women who is totally in control of her fate, totally in control of the realm of sex. The lesbian feminists tried to take control of female sexuality away from men - but the prostitute was doing that all along.
Camille Paglia
Image
Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.
Camille Paglia
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.
Camille Paglia
Image
When it defines man as the enemy, feminism is alienating women from their own bodies.
Camille Paglia
Image
Men knew that if they devirginized a woman, they could end up dead within twenty-four hours. These controls have been removed.
Camille Paglia
Image
I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.
Camille Paglia
Image
They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.
Camille Paglia
Image
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.
Camille Paglia
Image
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