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Camille Paglia
324 quotes
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The English language was created by poets, a five-hundred year enterprise of emotion and metaphor, the richest dialogue in world literature. French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisian intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity’s ancient campaign against pagan nature.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the past fifteen years, Marxist approaches towards literature have enjoyed increasing vogue. To be conscious of the social context of art seems to automatically entail a leftist orientation. But a theory is possible that is both avant-garde and capitalist. Marxism was one of Rousseau’s nineteenth-century progeny, energized by faith in the perfectabilty of man. Its belief that economic forces are the primary dynamic force in history is Romantic naturism in disguise. … Marxism is the bleakest of anxiety-formations against the power of cthonian mothers.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Marxism is a flight from the magic of the person and the mystique of hierarchy. It distorts the character of western culture, which is based on the charismatic power of person. Marxism can work only in pre-industrial societies of homogeneous populations. Raise the standard of living, and the rainbow riot of individualism will break out. Personality and art, which Marxism fears and censors, rebound from every effort to oppress them.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machine to eyeglasses, antibiotics and disposable diapers. We enjoy safe, fresh milk and meat, and vegetables and tropical fruits heaped in snowbound cities. When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry. When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence as would for a church processions.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The capitalist distribution network, a complex chain of factory, transport, warehouse and retail outlet, is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for “patriarchal society,” to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Capitalism is an art form.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The book of Genesis is a male declaration of independence from the ancient mother-cults. Its challenge to nature, so sexist to modern ears, marks one of the crucial moments in western history. Mind can never be free of matter. Only by mind imagining itself free can culture advance. The mother-cults, by reconciling man to nature, entrapped him in matter. Everything great in western civilization has come from struggling against our origins. Genesis is rigid and unjust, but it gave man hope as a man. It remade the world by male dynasty, canceling the power of mothers.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not a shred of evidence supports the existence of matriarchy anywhere in the world at any time. [...] The matriarchy hypothesis, revived by American feminism, continues to flourish outside the university”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The toothed vagina is no sexist hallucination: every penis is made less by every vagina, just as mankind, male and female, is devoured by mother nature. The vagina dentata is part of the Romantic revival of pagan myth. It is subliminally present in Poe’s voracious maelstrom and dank, scythe-swept pit. It overtly appears in the bible of French Decadence, Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884), where a dreamer is magnetically drawn towards mother nature’s open thighs, the “bloody depths” of a carnivorous flower rimmed by “swordblades.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art advances by self-mutilation of the artist.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Nefertiti bust is one of the most popular art works in the world. It is printed on scarves and molded in necklace pendants and coffee-table miniatures. But never in my experience is the bust exactly reproduced. The copyist softens it, feminizes it and humanizes it. The actual bust is intolerably severe. It is too uncanny an object for domestic display. Even art books lie. The bust is usually posed in profile or at an angle, so that the missing left pupil is hidden or shadowed. What happened to the eye?”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus, a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father’s business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Male tumescence is an assertion of the separateness of objects. An erection is architectural, sky-pointing. Female tumescence, through blood or water, is slow, gravitational, amorphous. In the war for human identity, male tumescence is an instrument, female tumescence an obstruction. The fatty female body is a sponge. At peak menstrual and natal moments, it is locked passively in place, suffering wave after wave of Dionysian power.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Greek pederasty honored the erotic magnetism of male adolescence in a way that today brings police to the door. Children are more conscious and perverse than parents like to think.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women have ironically enjoyed a greater symbolic, if not practical freedom. Thus it is that male and not female homosexuality has been harshly punished by law. A debater in Lucian declares, “Far better that a women, in the madness of her lust, should usurp the nature of man, than that man’s noble nature should be so degraded as to play the woman.” Similarly today, lesbian interludes are a staple of heterosexual pornography. Ever since man emerged from the dominance of nature, masculinity has been the most fragile and problematic of psychic states.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Effeminate men have suffered a bad press the world over.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Judaism’s campaign to make divinity invisible has never fully succeeded. Images are always eluding moral control, creating the brilliant western art tradition. Idolatry is fascism of the eye. The western eye will be served, with or without the consent of conscience.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oil painting and color, said Michelangelo, are for “women and the lazy.” His sharp-edged Apollonian style is the only way to beat back mother nature.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Fairie Queene makes cinema out of the west's primary principle: to see is to know; to know is to control. The Spenserian eye cuts, wounds, rapes.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea that the stars literally influence men (by a falling fluid, an influenza) is plainly untenable. But that the movements of the constellations are a clock by which earthly changes can be measured is less easy to dismiss.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I subscribe to Jung's theory of synchronicity.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Romanticism, like the Rousseauist Swinging Sixties, misunderstands the Dionysian as the pleasure principle, when it is in fact the gross continuum of pleasure-pain. Worshiping nature and seeking political and sexual freedom, Romanticism ends in imaginative entrammelment of every kind. Perfect freedom is intolerable and therefore impossible.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Romanticism, unlike the Renaissance, Amazons retain their power. Rousseau wants it both ways. Idolizing women is natural and right, a cosmic law. On the other hand, male recessiveness is blamed on female coercion. Either way, sadomasochistic dominance and submission are inherent in Rousseausism from the start.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egoism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Butchery is not the point of vampirism. Sex - domination and submission - is.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Woman's flirtatious arts of self-concealment mean man's approach must take the form of rape.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 'A Room of One's Own', Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalog of the British Museum: why, she asks, are there so many books written by men about women but none by women about men? The answer to her question is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman's dominance.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gautier says, “Baudelaire abhorred philanthropy, progressivists, utilitarians, humanitarians and utopianists.” In other words, Baudelaire condemned Rousseausism in all its forms. Today, Rousseausism has so triumphed that the arts and the avant-garde are synonymous with liberalism, an error enforced by literature teachers, with their humanist bias. I follow the Decadents in trying to drive Rousseauist benevolence out of the discourse in art and literature. The Decadents satirized the liberal faith in progress with sizzling prophecies of catastrophe and cultural collapse.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source