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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
Power
Construction
Artificial
Defense
Society
Nature

More quotes by 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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The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity's ancient campaign against pagan nature.
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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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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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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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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Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map.
Camille Paglia
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Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands.
Camille Paglia
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Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey.
Camille Paglia
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My prescription for women entering the war zone of the professions: study football. . . . Women who want to remake the future should look for guidance not to substitute parent figures but to the brash assertions of pagan sport.
Camille Paglia
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There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
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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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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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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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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The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they're dead is the nasty things I've said about them.
Camille Paglia
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The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.
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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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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I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.
Camille Paglia