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The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood.

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
Moral
Blade
American
Blades
Mother
Bare
Conveniently
Nature
Goddess
Goddesses
Cannot
Grasp
Resurrected
Without
Feminist
Shedding
Great
Forgotten
Ambivalence
Blood
Feminists

More quotes by 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.
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Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.
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It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.
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Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.
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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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government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior.
Camille Paglia
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History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence.
Camille Paglia
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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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Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.
Camille Paglia
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Old school feminism, coveting social power, is blind to woman's cosmic sexual power.
Camille Paglia
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Prostitution is not just a service industry, mopping up the overflow of male demand, which always exceeds female supply. Prostitution testifies to the amoral power struggle of sex, which religion has never been able to stop. Prostitutes, pornographers, and their patrons are marauders in the forest of archaic night.
Camille Paglia
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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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Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome.
Camille Paglia
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A woman simply is, but a man must become.
Camille Paglia
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I want young women when they're 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives. I think it's criminal - child abuse - that they're not told to do this [in school]. Right now it's just sex education and putting condoms on bananas. Girls should be asked to think about what they want in their lives when they're 50, 60 and 70.
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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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.
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The moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate - which is why Mitt Romney's political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave.
Camille Paglia
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Working moms commonly testify that they feel guilty when they are away from their children and guilty when they are not at their jobs. Devoted fathers certainly miss their children deeply, but it does not seem to be with the same gnawing, primal anxiety that often afflicts women.
Camille Paglia
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The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.
Camille Paglia