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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.

“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”

— Camille Paglia

Beauty

All Quotes by Camille Paglia

“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

“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

“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

“Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.”

— Camille Paglia

Art

“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

Men

“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

“In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education.”

— 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

“If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them.”

— Camille Paglia

Women

“Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.”

— Camille Paglia

Art

“When anything goes, it's women who lose.”

— Camille Paglia

Women

“Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.”

— Camille Paglia

Art

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.”

— Camille Paglia

History

“Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world - which, like it or not, is modern reality.”

— Camille Paglia

Design

“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