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

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity.
Camille Paglia
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There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders.
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Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.
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Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature.
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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.
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Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.
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The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force.
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Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.
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As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear.
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Old school feminism, coveting social power, is blind to woman's cosmic sexual power.
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Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.
Camille Paglia
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Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.
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Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.
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Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind.
Camille Paglia
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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.
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America is still a frontier country of wide open spaces. Our closeness to nature is one reason why our problem is not repression but regression our notorious violence is the constant eruption of primi-tiveness, of anarchic individualism.
Camille Paglia
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Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin.
Camille Paglia
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In the Seventies, women runners, developing amenorrhea and calcium-related shin splints, were the first to realize that nature is hovering over us, ready to shut down our systems if our fetus-feeding fat reserve drops below a certain percentage of body weight. In other words, in nature's eyes we are nothing but milk sacs and fat deposits.
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When it defines man as the enemy, feminism is alienating women from their own bodies.
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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