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Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power.

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
Defense
Society
Nature
Power
Construction
Artificial

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!
Camille Paglia
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Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman's attention.
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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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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I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
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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Not a shred of evidence supports the existence of matriarchy anywhere in the world at any time... The matriarchy hypothesis, revived by American feminism, continues to flourish outside the university.
Camille Paglia
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Science is a method of logical analysis of nature's operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature's forces, and their frequent predictability.
Camille Paglia
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Modernization means Westernization.
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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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.
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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Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.
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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Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son.
Camille Paglia
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We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.
Camille Paglia
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What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions.
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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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
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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