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Homosexuality is not 'normal' On the contrary it is a challenge to the norm...Nature exists whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction...No one is born gay. The idea is ridiculous...homosexuality is an adaptation, not an inborn trait.

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
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More quotes by Camille Paglia

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Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.
Camille Paglia
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[On Hollywood:] America's greatest achievement.
Camille Paglia
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Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son.
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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Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel.
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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Because I'm criticizing liberalism, people automatically call me a conservative. This is madness! The idea that somehow one cannot critique liberalism from the left, from the left wing of liberalism. I mean, how can people be so stupid?
Camille Paglia
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We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way. Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.
Camille Paglia
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Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.
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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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
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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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As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear.
Camille Paglia
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What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions.
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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I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions - which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.
Camille Paglia
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Foucault is the Cagliostro of our time.
Camille Paglia
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The moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate - which is why Mitt Romney's political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave.
Camille Paglia
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I want young women when they're 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives. I think it's criminal - child abuse - that they're not told to do this [in school]. Right now it's just sex education and putting condoms on bananas. Girls should be asked to think about what they want in their lives when they're 50, 60 and 70.
Camille Paglia
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I guess I'm just a natural warrior.
Camille Paglia