Camille Paglia Personal Quotations

I see far stronger and more charismatic personalities strolling around Philadelphia's neighborhoods than are being featured in most of today's bland daytime soaps.

Western man represents himself, on the political or psychological stage, in a spectacular world-theater. Our personality is innately cinematic, light-charged projections flickering on the screen of Western consciousness.

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.

Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.

Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another.

Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things , which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau.