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

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The plastic surgery issue is really looming because girls in the U.S. are getting it in their teens.
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The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.
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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?
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Sex IS power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live.
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Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo.
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Your life is a Fellini film, lacking only Anita Ekberg with a cat on her head.
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Foucault is the Cagliostro of our time.
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The capitalist distribution network, a complex chain of factory, transport, warehouse and retail outlet, is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture.
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Men, gay or straight, can get beauty and lewdness into one image. Women are forever softening, censoring, politicizing. ?
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We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives.
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Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map.
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Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.
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Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.
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In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called conservative, as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives.
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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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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.
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Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.
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.
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My anti-liberal position should not be mistaken for conservatism.
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American high schools have physically imprisoned young people, stripped them of civil liberties and fed them a diet of p.c. pap.
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