Camille Paglia Quotes About Tradition

Quotes about: Tradition

• 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.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Knowing, Humanity

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.208, Vintage

• The number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow "expertise" and "theoretical sophistication" (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought... Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Numbers, Ignorant

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

• In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal.

  Camille Paglia

  Law, Civilization, Tyrants

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae”, p.128, Yale University Press

• It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.

  Camille Paglia

  Recovery, Europe, Ideas

• The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.

  Camille Paglia

  Creating, Style, Example

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

• The piddling ignoramuses who deny that there is a distinct, discernible, objective western tradition are just woozy literati.

  Camille Paglia

  Tradition, Deny, Western

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Arion, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

• 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.

  Camille Paglia

  Intellectual, Style, Encounters

• There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.

  Camille Paglia

  Spiritual, Kings, Gay

  "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality". Camille Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, 1994.

• Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men [e.g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] in the German and British academic tradition.

  Camille Paglia

  Men, Intellectual, Feminism

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

• French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisan intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.

  Camille Paglia

  Intellectual, Speak, Tradition

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

• 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.

  Camille Paglia

  Years, Intellectual, Twenties

  "Sex, Art and American Culture: New Essays". Book by Camille Paglia, 1992.

• 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.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Greatness, Civilization

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Vamps & Tramps: New Essays”, p.115, Vintage

• Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.

  Camille Paglia

  Book, Writing, Sisterhood

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.241, Vintage

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