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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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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
Mean
Wings
Criticizing
People
Conservative
Critique
Stupid
Automatically
Call
Wing
Idea
Liberalism
Left
Criticize
Cannot
Madness
Ideas
Somehow

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.
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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Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women.
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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The most successful prostitutes are invisible, because the sign of a prostitute's success is her absolute blending with the environment. She's so shrewd, she never becomes visible. She never gets in trouble. She has command of her life, and her clients.
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.
Camille Paglia
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Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their ''evil'' look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it
Camille Paglia
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Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son.
Camille Paglia
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Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?
Camille Paglia
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Today, the ideal male is the gay man and the ideal female is the worker female, the woman who can work in a coal mine just like all the other men.
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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Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.
Camille Paglia
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We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de si?cle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way.
Camille Paglia
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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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A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.
Camille Paglia
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I realize now how lucky I was, in the total absence of role models, to have only men to rebel against. Today's women students are meeting their oppressors in dangerously seductive new form, as successful congenial female professors who view themselves as victims of a rigid foreign ideology.
Camille Paglia
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If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.
Camille Paglia
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Sex IS power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live.
Camille Paglia
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Eroticism is mystique that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.
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