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Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.

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
Repression
Adaptation
Mad
Drive
Burden
Function
Permitting
Conscious
Expanded
Consciousness
Evolutionary

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior.
Camille Paglia
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A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on 'All My Children' when half the women actors, young and old, seem to be afflicted by android Barbie creep. All those thick swatches of lifeless strands clustering lankly round ladies' necks! Like orange tanning spray, this is a fashion fad that should be put out of its misery.
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.
Camille Paglia
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We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence.
Camille Paglia
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For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to women's cosmic power.
Camille Paglia
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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.
Camille Paglia
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The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.
Camille Paglia
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Obama's folksy come-on is as bad as Madonna's faux British - and both are in need of fresh inspiration.
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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The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.
Camille Paglia
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Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.
Camille Paglia
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Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.
Camille Paglia
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Once you have become the centre of a conflict in a complex governmental enterprise you have the obligation to resign.
Camille Paglia
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It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.
Camille Paglia
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My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
Camille Paglia
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Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?
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.
Camille Paglia
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Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality.
Camille Paglia
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A woman simply is, but a man must become.
Camille Paglia
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Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaver-like tunneling to the top.
Camille Paglia