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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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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
Art
Moralists
Cannot
Moralist
Firsts
Appearances
First
Appearance
Great
Convinced
Artists
Meaning
Artist

More quotes by 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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Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.
Camille Paglia
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I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I'm sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.
Camille Paglia
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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.
Camille Paglia
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The Devil is 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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The moment there is imagination there is myth
Camille Paglia
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Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork.
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
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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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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.
Camille Paglia
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Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.
Camille Paglia
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Mind is a captive of the body.
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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Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel.
Camille Paglia
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Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power.
Camille Paglia
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Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity.
Camille Paglia
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Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as 'a wise Latina' trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment - a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism.
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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If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.
Camille Paglia