Camille Paglia Quotes
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Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.
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Even the most morbid of the rape ranters have a childlike faith in the perfectibility of the universe, which they see as blighted solely by nasty men. They simplistically project outward onto a mythical 'patriarchy' their own inner conflicts and moral ambiguities.
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I want to cry out to these young girls: Stop! Think! . . . For heaven's sake, don't fall down the rabbit hole of the lesbian scene. You will never escape, and your talent will wither on the vine. Your energy will be wasted and absorbed in repetition without progression. Women alone are Spenser's Bower of Bliss, enclosed, comfortable, and dangerous.
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Every male copulating with a woman returns to his origins in the womb. Goethe postponed intercourse until he was forty. This must be related to his self-imposed distance from his forceful mother. To refuse phallic penetration is to refuse surrender to the female matrix.
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We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism.
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The reason Wilde did his best work after turning homosexual is that women simply reinforced his own feminine sentimentality. … Heterosexuality inhibited his imagination because woman is physically and psychologically internal.
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The venerable emeritus professors still at Yale when I entered graduate school in the 1960s may have been reserved, puritanical WASPs, but they were men of honor who had given their lives to scholarship. Today in the elite schools, honor and ethics are gone.
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Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It's an illusion. Men are pussy-whipped. And they know it. That's what the strip clubs are about; not woman as victim, not woman as slave, but woman as goddess.
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Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.
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Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him.
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High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces.
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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.
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Following the sexual revolution of the Sixties, dating has become a form of Russian roulette. Some girls have traditional religious values and mean to remain virgins until marriage. Others are leery of AIDS, unsure of what they want, but can be convinced. For others, anything goes: they’ll jump into bed on the first date. What’s a guy to do?
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I am a very reclusive, private person.
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The Dionysian is no picnic.
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I guess I'm just a natural warrior.
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Capitalism is an art form.
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He was a revealing symbol. He called himself passive-aggressive. There was self-pity, whining. There was a diminishment, a diminution. He was sitting there in his sweater, hunched over his guitar, looking like a little lost boy. Compare that with the great figures of my generation: Jimi Hendrix. Pete Townshend. Keith Richards.
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I had crushes on women - actually I loved charismatic, extreme people, women or men. By high school I was saying I must be a lesbian, because if you are attracted to women, you're a lesbian. I was also attracted to men, but I didn't get along with men.
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Feminism’s claim that it discovered rape is simply false.
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Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things, which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau.
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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.
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Sade has barely made a dent on American academic consciousness. It is his violence far more than his sex which is so hard for liberals to accept. For Sade, sex is violence. Violence is the authentic spirit of mother nature.
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No genuinely avant-garde artist should ever be on the government dole.