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They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

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
Constant
Civilization
Understand
Nature
Nearness
Fragility
Savage
Savages

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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The unhappy truth is that male homosexuality will never be fully accepted by the heterosexual majority, who are obeying the dictates not of bigoted society or religion but of procreative nature.
Camille Paglia
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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.
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The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.
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The born-yesterday French-besotted faddists, addicted sniffers of wet printer's ink, think they're starting on the ground floor so they're condemned to another hundred years of trial and error. The rest of us can safely ignore them.
Camille Paglia
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My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.
Camille Paglia
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My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility
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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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Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.
Camille Paglia
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Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind.
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The followers of Derrida are pathetic, snuffling in French pockets for bits of pieces of a deconstructive method already massively and coherently presented and with a mature sense of the sacred in Buddhism and Hinduism.
Camille Paglia
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Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men's relationships with women.
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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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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If feminism has receded in visibility and prestige, it is precisely because its vision of life's goals and rewards has become too narrow and elitist.
Camille Paglia
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Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity.
Camille Paglia
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Not a shred of evidence supports the existence of matriarchy anywhere in the world at any time... The matriarchy hypothesis, revived by American feminism, continues to flourish outside the university.
Camille Paglia
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When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.
Camille Paglia
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All great stars are competitive. That's a sign of a true artist - if you don't have the fire of competition deep down inside, you're never going to achieve anything. You have to want to be king of the heap.
Camille Paglia
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Modernization means Westernization.
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