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Camille Paglia

43 quotes

Camille Paglia (born 1947) is an American cultural critic, feminist, and author known for her provocative and iconoclastic views on art, literature, sex, and politics. Her book *Sexual Personae* challenged mainstream feminist thought and established her as one of the most controversial and stimulating public intellectuals of her generation.

“Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends.”

— Camille Paglia

Family

All Quotes by Camille Paglia

“Beauty is our weapon against nature by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.”

— Camille Paglia

Beauty

“Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo.”

— Camille Paglia

Failure

“It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.”

— Camille Paglia

Art

“Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.”

— Camille Paglia

History

“Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!”

— Camille Paglia

Art

“I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America's most original and courageous political analysts. He has the true 1960s spirit - audacious and irreverent, yet passionately engaged and committed to social change.”

— Camille Paglia

Change

“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

Poetry

“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

Women

“Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.”

— Camille Paglia

Mom

“Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends.”

— Camille Paglia

Family

“And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the 'mob' - a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.”

— Camille Paglia

Freedom

“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

Art

“Now that virtually every career is an option for ambitious girls, it can no longer be considered regressive or reactionary to reintroduce discussion of marriage and motherhood to primary education. We certainly do not want to return to the simplistic duality of home economics classes for girls and wood shop for boys.”

— Camille Paglia

Education

“Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women's movement of the late 1960s and '70s.”

— Camille Paglia

Women

“It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.”

— Camille Paglia

Freedom

“Madonna remains the most visible performer on the planet, as well as one of the wealthiest, but would anyone seriously say that artistic self-development is her primary motivating principle? She is too busy with Kabbalah, fashion merchandising, adoption melodramas, the gym, and ill-starred horseback riding to study art.”

— Camille Paglia

Art

“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

History

“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

Knowledge

“Younger women have no problem in reconciling beauty with ambitions as a professional woman.”

— Camille Paglia

Beauty

“Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?”

— Camille Paglia

Music