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Camille Paglia Quotes

Total quotes (39)

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia

Birthname

Birthday April 2, 1947

Educated At Yale University

Political Parties Democratic Party

Nationality United States Of America

Occupations Professor, Art Historian, Literary Critic, Writer, Journalist

Religion Atheism, Atheist

Total quotes (39)

This is all meaningless... sometimes it’s like, 'oh my God, the news', and then I pick up my book and suddenly I’m reading about ten thousand years ago again, and, wow, that gives you a perspective.

— Camille Paglia, What Camille Paglia Understands About the Trump Era

News Books Quote of the Moment

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Sex is not a tragedy, it's a comedy!

— Camille Paglia, Camille Paglia on Hugh Hefner's Legacy, Trump's Masculinity and Feminism's Sex Phobia

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Nature has a master agenda we can only dimly know.

— Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

Nature What Are We?Gaia Quote of the Moment

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Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature.

— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

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All sacred spaces, pagan or Christian, should be honored, not because there is or is not a God but because these are quiet points of contact between the individual and the macrocosm.

— Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (Vintage Original)

Designing Space Scared The Religions after Religion Designing Quiet

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In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment and abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity.

— Camille Paglia, Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror

Individual Rights

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The massive power of commercial media can only be countered by alternative images from world art and culture.

— Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

Art Art and Commerce Media Imagery

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I know what real radicals look like — and they did not go on to graduate school.

— Camille Paglia, Crisis In The American Universities

Extremism Radicals Higher Education

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Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.

— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Don’t Let It All Through Repression What Stops Us From Going Crazy

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Teenage boys goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.

— Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (Vintage Original)

Male Identity Teenage Wildlife Sexual Identity

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Forms of cultural expression have their own dynamic, whose evolution can never be fully foreseen.

— Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

Idea Expression Thought as Evolution

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I long ago stopped watching TV news and chat shows because of the tedium of their hackneyed polarized politics and smarmy personnel.

— Camille Paglia, Prominent Democrat Feminist Camille Paglia Says Hillary Clinton 'Exploits Feminism'

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When the prestige of state and religion is low, men are free, but they find freedom intolerable and seek new ways to enslave themselves, through drugs or depression.

— Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

Freedom Politcs Infrastructure of Control No Freedom

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The taboo on woman’s body is the taboo that always hovers over the place of magic.

— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Taboo sexuality Female Body

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To impose rigid sex codes devised for the genteel bourgeois office on the dynamic performing arts will inevitably limit rapport, spontaneity, improvisation and perhaps creativity itself.

— Camille Paglia, Movies, #MeToo and Modern Sexuality

Sexual Dynamics Art and Sex Me Too Gender Relations

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A bitter polarization of liberal and conservative has become so extreme and strident in both the Americas and Europe that it sometimes resembles mental illness, severed from the common sense realities of everyday life.

— Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

Polarization Politcs Left and Right Quote of the Moment

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Man is a fetishist. Without his fetish, woman will just gobble him up again.

— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Fetishism sexuality

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Every male projection is transient and must be anxiously, endlessly renewed.

— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Men The Problem With A Being Man Male Issues Male Anxiety The Anxiety of Masculinity

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Yes! I believe in objectification. The human eye makes objects.

— Camille Paglia, Camille Paglia cuts the malarkey: Women just need to toughen up

Objectification

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Major peaks of western culture have been accompanied by a high incidence of male homosexuality— in classical Athens and Renaissance Florence and London. Male concentration and projection are self-enhancing, leading to supreme achievements of Apollonian

— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Homosexuality Male Aesthetics

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Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind. Every idea in poetry is grounded in emotion. Every word is a palpation of the body. The multiplicity of interpretation surrounding a poem mirrors the stormy uncontrollability of emotion, where nature works her will.

— Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

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Great art has often been made by bad people. So what? Expecting the artist to be a good person was a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism, rejected by the 'art for art’s sake' movement led by Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.

— Camille Paglia, #MeToo and Modern Sexuality

Where Art Comes From Complex Moral Portraits Aesthetics vs. Ethics

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The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects of men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an orgasm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery shrouds woman’s sexuality.

— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

The Secret of Secrecy Female Sexuality Female Allure Hidden

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The moment there is imagination, there is myth.

— Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

Imagination Myth Creating

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Political correctness represents the fossilized institutionalization of once-vital revolutionary ideas, which have become mere rote formulas. It is repressively Stalinist, dependent on a labyrinthine, parasitic bureaucracy to enforce its empty dictates.

— Camille Paglia, Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror

Political Correctness

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Woman’s body is a labyrinth in which man is lost.

— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

female sexuality Sex

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Everything sacred and inviolable provokes profanation and violation.

— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Bringing The High Low Desecration Break The Profundity Boundary Breaks

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My lifelong gender dysphoria has certainly been a primary inspiration for my entire career as a researcher and writer. I have never for a moment felt female—but neither have I ever felt male either. I regard my ambiguous position between the sexes as a privilege that has given me special access to and insight into a broad range of human thought and response.

— Camille Paglia, Prominent Democrat Feminist Camille Paglia Says Hillary Clinton 'Exploits Feminism'

gender Gender Identity

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Can there be any finer demonstration of the insularity and mediocrity of today’s Manhattan prestige media? Wow, millionaire workaholic Donald Trump chased young, beautiful, willing women and liked to boast about it. Jail him now! Blame for this fiasco falls squarely upon the New York Times editors who delegated to two far too young journalists, Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey, the complex task of probing the glitzy, exhibitionistic world of late-twentieth-century beauty pageants, gambling casinos, strip clubs, and luxury resorts. Neither Barbaro, a 2002 graduate of Yale, nor Twohey, a 1998 graduate of Georgetown University, had any frame of reference for sexual analysis aside from the rote political correctness that has saturated elite American campuses for nearly 40 years.

— Camille Paglia, Camille Paglia: PC feminists misfire again, as fearful elite media can’t touch Donald Trump

New York Media Donald Trump Ivy League

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The body, for good or ill, has become a primary marker of identity in this transient society where the extended family and old community ties have broken down. Style is cyclic: all standards will eventually change. But that may not be soon enough for young people (increasingly male as well as female) barraged by images of ‘better’ bodies than the ones they have been dealt. By encouraging historical exploration, we can reduce pressure and anxiety. There are companions and competitors beyond number in the great image book of the past.

— Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

Body Image Bodies Perception of Self

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I am very concerned about current gender theory rhetoric that convinces young people that if they feel uneasy about or alienated from their assignment to one sex, then they must take concrete steps, from hormone therapy to alarmingly irreversible surgery, to become the other sex. I find this an oddly simplistic and indeed reactionary response to what should be regarded as a golden opportunity for flexibility and fluidity.

— Camille Paglia, Prominent Democrat Feminist Camille Paglia Says Hillary Clinton 'Exploits Feminism'

Gender Theory Sex Reassignment Surgery Flexibility

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What we have right now is this ridiculous situation where if you criticize liberals, people say, 'She’s a conservative!' Now, what kind of a lack of information is this about intellectual history? Liberalism is only 200 years old. There are other points of view on the world besides that of liberalism in its present decayed condition. We of the Sixties were often in revolt against liberals. Lenny Bruce, when he recited all those dirty words, was trying to offend liberals, not conservatives. So in the present situation I don’t know what to call myself. I would maybe say 'libertarian' or something like that. I’m trying to create a new system— I call it 'Italian pagan Catholicism.' But that may be too esoteric! I’m thinking that I want to bring about an enlightened center. I would like to call it, maybe, 'pragmatic liberalism,' that is, a liberalism that has learned the political lessons of the past twenty-five years.

— Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays

IPC Proliferate Difference Liberalism

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I am still amazed at the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to governor—a man who has never held political office and who participated in only one serious debate. It is a disturbing sign in any nation when politics have become so inefficient and corrupt that the people turn to an outsider as ‘strong man’ for leadership. This is how fascism is born. Because it is Schwarzenegger’s machismo—represented on a superhuman scale in his films—that California voters want to attack the entrenched special interests in Sacramento, his behavior toward women was irrelevant. Or rather, his behavior actually reinforced his virile image as a forceful personality who pushes through barriers

— Camille Paglia, Zombie time at campaign Hillary: Camille Paglia on Trump’s real strength and Clinton’s fatal sleepwalking

Arnold Schwarzenegger Politics Election 2016 Sacramento Politcs

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Alcohol's enhancement of direct face-to-face dialogue is precisely what is needed by today's technologically agile generation, magically interconnected yet strangely isolated by social media. Clumsy hardcore sexting has sadly supplanted simple hanging out over a beer at a buzzing dive. By undermining the art of conversation, the age-21 law has also had a disastrous effect on our arts and letters, with their increasing dullness and mediocrity. This tyrannical infantilizing of young Americans must stop!

— Camille Paglia, Time.com

Alcohol Laws Lower The American Drinking Age

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I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity. I want to restore the terms art and culture to their general nineteenth-century sense. But I also want to apply “art” to everything artificial or fabricated, including engineering projects like roads and bridges. Art for me means all works of imagination, from poetry to television commercials to pornography, with questions of quality still operative. I see the Western past as a story, episodic and cumulative.

— Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (Vintage Original)

Defining History Defining Art

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Drunk with words, spin, and snark, middle-class journalists can't be bothered to notice the complex physical constructions that make modern civilization possible. The laborers who build and maintain these marvels are recognized only if they can be shoehorned into victim status. But if they dare to think for themselves and vote differently from their liberal overlords, they are branded as rubes and pariahs.

— Camille Paglia, Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror

Journalism In 2017 Physical vs. Digital Economies

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How eerily history seems to be repeating itself! But this time it is the fate of the entire nation that hangs in the balance. Trump is a stormily dynamic change-maker who will surely win this election unless the Democrats get their house in order and nominate a figure of honor and integrity. Bernie Sanders, who represents the wave of the future, is my first choice, but Joe Biden, with his international experience, would be a solid second. If the kamikaze party wants to nominate an ethically challenged incompetent like Hillary Clinton, then I’ll be voting Green for the second time. Go, Jill Stein!

— Camille Paglia, Zombie time at campaign Hillary: Camille Paglia on Trump’s real strength and Clinton’s fatal sleepwalking

Election 2016 Jill Stein Green Party Joe Biden

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No sin or crime by Polanski the man will ever reduce the towering achievement of Polanski the artist...

The case of Woody Allen, who began his career as a comedy writer and stand-up comedian, is quite different. Polanski’s chilly worldview descends from European avant-garde movements like surrealism and existentialism. In a sinister cameo in Chinatown, Polanski sliced open Jack Nicholson’s nose with a switchblade knife. Allen, however, in his onscreen persona of lovable nebbish, seductively ingratiated himself with audiences. Hence the current wave of disillusion with Allen and his many fine films emanates from a sense of deception and betrayal, including among some actors who once felt honored to work with him.

— Camille Paglia, Movies, #MeToo and Modern Sexuality

Woody Allen Hollywood Roman Polanski Who Are You?Art and Ethics

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Barbra Streisand has never received due credit for her pioneering role in shattering female convention and laying the groundwork for second-wave feminism. Emerging from bohemian nightclubs where her campy patter and vintage costumes were shaped by gay male sensibility, Streisand embodied a scrappy non-conformism and confrontational toughness that strikingly contrasted with the emotional depth and elegant beauty of her singing.

— Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

Musicians feminism Barbra Streisand

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