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The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood.
Camille Paglia
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I am popular with certain people, but I'm still blocked out of the establishment. I hate that incestuous world. It makes me sick. It's impossible for anything truly original to get done. Thinking is not allowed. It's all PC. It is so horrible because it is a fossilized, parasitic version of Sixties philosophy.
Camille Paglia
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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.
Camille Paglia
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Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.
Camille Paglia
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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
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In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man.
Camille Paglia
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Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey.
Camille Paglia
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The Dionysian is no picnic.
Camille Paglia
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Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?
Camille Paglia
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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.
Camille Paglia
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The smouldering eroticism of great European actresses like Jeanne Moreau demonstrated to my generations women's archetypal mystery and glamour, completely missing from the totalitarian world-view of the misogynist Foucault. For me, the big French D is not Derrida, but Deneuve.
Camille Paglia
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A woman simply is, but a man must become.
Camille Paglia
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Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.
Camille Paglia
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We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives.
Camille Paglia
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Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another.
Camille Paglia
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The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.
Camille Paglia
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Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.
Camille Paglia
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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.
Camille Paglia
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Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him.
Camille Paglia
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Academic Marxism is a fantasy world, and unctuous compassion-sweepstakes, into which real workers or peasants never penetrate.
Camille Paglia
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Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as 'a wise Latina' trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment - a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism.
Camille Paglia
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The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair.
Camille Paglia
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I love the Web, but the basis of my work is going through the physical books. When you go to the library, you see other books around on the shelves that you never knew existed. You can flip through a book and see the whole outline of it.
Camille Paglia
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The instant myth of Amy Fisher turned feminist dogma on on is head: as in the hit films Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, woman rules and destroys. The femme fatale is for real.
Camille Paglia
