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Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.

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
Answer
Intellectual
Present
Answers
America
Life

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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[On U.S. universities:] The bland leading the bland.
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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You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered.
Camille Paglia
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Because of my own family's service (in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Massachusetts and New York National Guard), I am a strong supporter of the military and do believe that there are just wars.
Camille Paglia
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The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.'
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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There are no female geniuses because there are no female Jack-the-Rippers.
Camille Paglia
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There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders.
Camille Paglia
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Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.
Camille Paglia
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If feminism has receded in visibility and prestige, it is precisely because its vision of life's goals and rewards has become too narrow and elitist.
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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Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality.
Camille Paglia
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Every man harbors an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free.
Camille Paglia
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Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.
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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The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.
Camille Paglia
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Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men's relationships with women.
Camille Paglia
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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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Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.
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