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Camille Paglia Quotes

born 1947 United States

Camille Paglia (born 2 April 1947) is an American author, scholar, feminist and critic, best known for writing Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, a survey of Western art and literature from earliest recorded history to the 20th Century.

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Random Camille Paglia quote

247 quotes

Despite hundreds of studies, cause-and-effect relationship between pornography and violence has never been satisfactorily proved.

Vamps and Tramps (1994)

The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.

Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet.

The unhappy truth is that male homosexuality will never be fully accepted by the heterosexual majority, who are obeying the dictates not of bigoted society or religion but of procreative nature.

Vamps and Tramps (1994)

For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to women’s cosmic power.

Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

Men, gay or straight, can get beauty and lewdness into one image. Women are forever softening, censoring, politicizing.

Vamps and Tramps (1994)

Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.

Vamps and Tramps (1994)

Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Many things that erupt in rape or violence, or battery and so on, are happening when a woman is pushing that button of fear and dependency.

Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

The more you know, the less you are impressed by Foucault.

Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

Cock teasing is a universal reality. It is part of women’s merciless testing and cold-eyed comparison shopping for potential mates. Men will do anything to win the favor of women.

Vamps and Tramps (1994)

The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

The saints, many of them women, warred with themselves as well as God. The body has its own animal urges, just as there are attractions and repulsions in sex that modern liberalism cannot face.

Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

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.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

The real butches are straight … dealing with and controlling men makes you stronger.

Vamps and Tramps (1994)

My stress on the truth in sexual stereotypes and on the biologic basis of sex differences is sure to cause controversy.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

I am a passionate admire of Sappho, but that has to be one of the stupidest sentences I have ever seen in a scholarly book.

Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

The piddling ignoramuses who deny that there is a distinct, discernible, objective western tradition are just woozy literati.

Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

The gargantuan promiscuity of the Seventies gay male world was a pagan phenomenon, unequaled in scale since the Roman empire.

Vamps and Tramps (1994)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Camille Paglia (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.