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Camille Paglia

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Famous Camille Paglia Quotes

“The formidable combined forces of Judeo-Christianity and modern science have never succeeded in wiping out pagan astrology, nor will they ever. Astrology supplies what is missing in the west's official moral and intellectual codes. Astrology is the oldest organised art form of sexual personae. Waging war on astrology, the medieval and Renaissance Church promulgated the distortion that astrology is fatalism, a flouting of God's Providence and the necessity for moral struggle. But the predictive part of astrology is less important than its psychology, which three thousand years of continuous practise have given a phenomenal subtlety. Astrology does insist on self-discipline and self-transformation. Judging astrology by those vague sun-sign columns in the daily paper is like judging Christianity by a smudged shop window of black-velvet day-glo paintings of the Good Shepherd.”

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Book:Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
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“The cat's sophisticated personae are masks of an advanced theatricality. Priests and god its own cult, the cat follows a code of ritual purity, cleaning itself religiously. Priest and god of its own cult, the car sacrifices to itself and may share its ceremonies with the elect. [...] The cat is the least Christian inhabitant of the entire home.”

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Book:Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
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“I sometimes call my new system 'Italian pagan Catholicism,' but it could more accurately be called 'pragmatic liberalism,' with roots in Enlightenment political philosophy. It is a synthesis of the enduring dual elements in our culture, pagan and Judeo-Christian, Romantic and Classic.”

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Author:Camille Paglia
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“Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.”

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Book:Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
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“Elizabeth Taylor is, in my opinion, the greatest actress in film history. She instinctively understands the camera and its nonverbal intimacies. Opening her violet eyes, she takes us into the liquid realm of emotion, which she inhabits by Pisces intuition. Richard Burton said that Taylor showed him how to act for the camera. Economy and understatement are essential. At her best, Elizabeth Taylor simply is. An electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens. It is an extra-sensory, pagan phenomenon.”

SaidEyeFilmFacesSpaceEmotionOpinionEconomyEssentialsCamerasIntuitionActressesOpeningIntimacyRealmsExtrasPhenomenonElectricLensesVioletEroticLiquidPaganSensorySpace BetweenVibrateUnderstatementNonverbalFilm HistoryPisces
Book:Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
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“I support, defend, and admire prostitutes, gay or straight. They do important and necessary work, whether moralists of the Left and Right like it or not. Feminists who think they can abolish the sex trade are in a state of massive delusion. Only a ruthless, fascist regime of vast scale could eradicate the rogue sex impulse that is indistinguishable from the life force. Simply in the Western world, pagan sexuality has survived 2000 years of Judaeo-Christian persecution and is hardly going to be defeated by a few feminists whacking at it with their brooms.”

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Author:Camille Paglia
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