Camille Paglia Quotes - Page 14

The stigma of the prostitute is the badge of her identity. That is why the client goes to her. If he wanted someone without a stigma, he'd go and screw the lady next door.

Perhaps there is no greater issue facing contemporary women than the choices they must make about balancing home and work.

Obama's folksy come-on is as bad as Madonna's faux British - and both are in need of fresh inspiration.

Popular culture - above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R & B roots - did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader.

If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis.

We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence.

Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo.

A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on 'All My Children' when half the women actors, young and old, seem to be afflicted by android Barbie creep. All those thick swatches of lifeless strands clustering lankly round ladies' necks! Like orange tanning spray, this is a fashion fad that should be put out of its misery.

Once you have become the centre of a conflict in a complex governmental enterprise you have the obligation to resign.

Old school feminism, coveting social power, is blind to woman's cosmic sexual power.

The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.

In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace.

In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called "conservative," as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives.

When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde.

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.

Love for all means coldness to something or someone. Even Jesus, let us recall, was unnecessarily rude to his mother at Cana.

The so-called miracle of birth is nature getting her own way.

Ballet is the body rising. Ballet is ceremonial and hieratic. Its disdain for the commonplace material world is the source of its authority and glamour.

Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt.

Not since the Black Panthers sailed into their Upper East Side tea party has there been so daffy an exercise in radical chic.

Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was sill scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!

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

Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.

Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America.

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.