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

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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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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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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My anti-liberal position should not be mistaken for conservatism.
Camille Paglia
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I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.
Camille Paglia
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Anyone who gets his or her political news primarily from the New York Times (which made the ethically challenged carpetbagger Hillary a senator) is a fool.
Camille Paglia
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It's so tiring to make love to women, it takes forever. I'm too lazy to be a lesbian.
Camille Paglia
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There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.
Camille Paglia
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Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.
Camille Paglia
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Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.
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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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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All great stars are competitive. That's a sign of a true artist - if you don't have the fire of competition deep down inside, you're never going to achieve anything. You have to want to be king of the heap.
Camille Paglia
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Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.
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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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?
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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I view the prostitute as one of the few women who is totally in control of her fate, totally in control of the realm of sex. The lesbian feminists tried to take control of female sexuality away from men - but the prostitute was doing that all along.
Camille Paglia
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Heterosexual love,. is in sync with cosmic forces. Not everyone has the stomach for daily war with nature.
Camille Paglia
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Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.
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