Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.
Camille PagliaI believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.
Camille PagliaStraight men who visit prostitutes are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family--in other words, from society, religion, and procreative Mother Nature.
Camille PagliaYoung feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women's movement of the late 1960s and '70s.
Camille PagliaI want young women when they're 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives. I think it's criminal - child abuse - that they're not told to do this [in school]. Right now it's just sex education and putting condoms on bananas. Girls should be asked to think about what they want in their lives when they're 50, 60 and 70.
Camille Paglia