Camille Paglia quotes - page 14

Now that virtually every career is an option for ambitious girls, it can no longer be considered regressive or reactionary to reintroduce discussion of marriage and motherhood to primary education. We certainly do not want to return to the simplistic duality of home economics classes for girls and wood shop for boys. (Camille Paglia)
Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature. View quote
Camille Paglia
We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de siFcle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way. View quote
Camille Paglia
Sex IS power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. View quote
Camille Paglia
I regard affirmative action as pernicious - a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women. View quote
Camille Paglia
There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion. View quote
Camille Paglia
Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improviser. His parables are great one-liners. View quote
Camille Paglia
The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants. View quote
Camille Paglia
My problem is that I do not get along with lesbians at all. They don't like me, and I don't like them. View quote
Camille Paglia
Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women. View quote
Camille Paglia
As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear. (Camille Paglia)
Many, perhaps most, very learned people prefer the company of their books to sitting in a crowd listening to history and art being mangled; furthermore, it is unlikely that the venerable scholars will stand up afterward to declare, "This lecture was a load of crap." The more profound a professor's distaste with the proceedings, the more likely he is to melt away at the end of the talk. View quote
Camille Paglia
Madonna remains the most visible performer on the planet, as well as one of the wealthiest, but would anyone seriously say that artistic self-development is her primary motivating principle? She is too busy with Kabbalah, fashion merchandising, adoption melodramas, the gym, and ill-starred horseback riding to study art. View quote
Camille Paglia
We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes. View quote
Camille Paglia
I am a registered Democrat who is determined to return my party to the proletarian principles of the Franklin D. Roosevelt era. View quote
Camille Paglia
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions. View quote
Camille Paglia
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots. View quote
Camille Paglia
My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm - as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy. View quote
Camille Paglia
American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone. View quote
Camille Paglia
The plastic surgery issue is really looming because girls in the U.S. are getting it in their teens. (Camille Paglia)
I believe that everybody has the right to view his or her own body as a palette. However, I think intellectuals should at least try to be role models. View quote
Camille Paglia
Younger women have no problem in reconciling beauty with ambitions as a professional woman. View quote
Camille Paglia
Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends. View quote
Camille Paglia
Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility. View quote
Camille Paglia