Camille Paglia Quotes
-
Women played no part in Athenian high culture. They could not vote, attend the theatre, or walk in the stoa talking philosophy. But the male orientation of Greek culture was inseparable of its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.
-
I have lesbian impulses, so I understand how a man looks at a woman. … When I was growing up, it wasn't possible for me to do anything about my attraction to women. Lesbianism didn't exist in that time, as far as I knew.
-
I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels.
-
Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love.
-
Feminism is dead. The movement is absolutely dead. The women's movement tried to suppress dissident voices for way too long. There's no room for dissent.
-
The followers of Derrida are pathetic, snuffling in French pockets for bits of pieces of a deconstructive method already massively and coherently presented – and with a mature sense of the sacred – in Buddhism and Hinduism.
-
Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.
-
There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
-
Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.
-
In the real world, very smart people fail and mediocre people rise. Part of what makes people fail or succeed are skills that have nothing to do with IQ. Also, the idea that intelligence can be gauged by an IQ test is erroneous.
-
The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.
-
Ever since Romanticism, an oppositional mode, artists have the right, and indeed the duty, to attack social convention. But it is ridiculous and in fact self-infantilizing for them to expect to be financially supported by the general public whom they are insulting.
-
Lately, I've been doing a lot of tuning in and impatiently tuning out. As a longtime fan of talk radio, I don't think this bodes well for the long-term broad appeal of the medium.
-
Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.
-
Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.
-
Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature.
-
The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms.
-
Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.
-
The spiritual history of the Sixties has yet to be written.
-
In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education.
-
Madonna can still produce a catchy pop song, but she hasn't expanded her artistic vocabulary since the 1990s. Her concerts are glitzy extravaganzas of special effects overkill. She leaves little space in them for emotional depth or unscripted rapport with the audience.
-
Madonna is her own Hollywood studio - a popelike mogul and divine superstar in one. She has a laserlike instinct for publicity, aided by her visual genius for still photography (which none of her legion of imitators has). Unfortunately, her public life has dissolved into a series of staged photo ops.
-
Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.
-
Christianity began as a religion of the poor and dispossessed - farmers, fishermen, Bedouin shepherds. There's a great lure to that kind of simplicity and rigor - the discipline, the call to action.