Quote

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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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
Call
Lisa
History
Walter
Fear
Menace
Nothing
Vampire
Thinking
Tasks
Courses
Coasting
Course
Blankness
Secret
Mona

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Capitalism is an art form.
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There is such a thing as seduction, and it needs encouragement rather than discouragement in our puritanical Anglo-American world.
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As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear.
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[On U.S. universities:] The bland leading the bland.
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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.
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Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality.
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Imperialism and slavery are no white male monopoly, but are everywhere from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia to India, China and Japan.
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Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.
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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.
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I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man’s greatest idea. Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hard-core gay activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imagination to educate the young. … Until the left comes to its senses about the cultural power of religion, the right will continue to broaden its appeal.
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For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to women's cosmic power.
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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.
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Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.
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I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.
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Mind is a captive of the body.
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Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey.
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Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.
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The Devil is a woman.
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The moment there is imagination there is myth
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Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.
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