Camille Paglia

"Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents."

"Christianity began as a religion of the poor and dispossessed - farmers, fishermen, Bedouin shepherds. There's a great lure to that kind of simplicity and rigor - the discipline, the call to action."

"I don't go to New York. I don't go to parties. I just do my business and study nature. My career is 28 years in an obscure art school, with limited staff and no perks. All I am is a teacher."

"Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it."

"Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature."

"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."

"Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel."

"Charisma is the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality. It flows outward from a simplicity or unity of being and a composure and controlled vitality. There is gracious accommodation, yet commanding impersonality. 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."

"The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny."

"My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself We need more dissent and less dogma."

"Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters."

"The only road to freedom is self-education in art. Art is not a luxury for any advancedcivilization; it is a necessity, without which creative intelligence will wither and die. Evenin economically troubled times, support for the arts should be a national imperative. Dance, for example, requires funding not only to secure safe, roomy rehearsal space butto preserve the indispensible continuity of the teacher-student link. American culture hasbecome unbalanced by its obsession with the blood sport of politics, a voracious vortexconsuming everything in its path. History shows that, for both individuals and nations,political power is transient. America's true legacy is its ideal of liberty, which has inspiredinsurgencies around the world. Politicians and partisans of both the Right and the Leftmust recognize that art too is a voice of liberty, requiring nurture without intrusion. Artunites the spiritual and material realms. In an age of alluring, magical machines, thesociety that forgets art risks losing its soul."

"We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible."