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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.

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
Forms
System
Passivity
Society
Humiliating
Nature
Inherited
Form
Alter
Change
Reducing
May
Slowly
Suddenly

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women.
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I see far stronger and more charismatic personalities strolling around Philadelphia's neighborhoods than are being featured in most of today's bland daytime soaps.
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Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.
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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.
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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.
Camille Paglia
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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.
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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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.
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Daytime soap operas, which I used to adore, have been declining in quality and importance for over a decade, and I gradually stopped monitoring them.
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My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.
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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In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace.
Camille Paglia
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It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.
Camille Paglia
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What is pretty in nature is confined to the thin skin of the globe upon which we huddle. Scratch that skin, and nature's daemonic ugliness will erupt.
Camille Paglia
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Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.
Camille Paglia
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When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde.
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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Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him.
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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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.
Camille Paglia