A Quote by Camille Paglia

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

Camille Paglia

Quote Topics

Changing Complacent Conditions Elite Greedy Hopelessly Infatuated Late Like Past Powerless Respond Rome Ruled

Quote Author

Camille Paglia
American - Author
Born: April 2, 1947

To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to will to do the like again, — such are the essential conditions for the making of a people.

Ernest Renan

I think the reporter or journalist is well served by having a responsibility to the powerless, to use a much-abused cliché. The voice of the powerless is in some danger of not being heard in the elite discourses we now have in the mainstream media.

Pankaj Mishra

The conditions of suffering that exist today in our impoverished communities are not acceptable. The reflection of those conditions are less concerning to me. And I work everyday about changing the conditions.

Russell Simmons

There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Rome is one enormous mausoleum. There, the Past lies visibly stretched upon his bier. There is no today or tomorrow in Rome; it is perpetual yesterday.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Confusion conditions activity, which conditions consciousness, which conditions embodied personality, which conditions sensory experiences, which conditions impact, which conditions mood, which conditions craving, which conditions clinging, which conditions becoming, which conditions birth, which conditions aging and death.

Gautama Buddha

Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite - the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.

Anne Applebaum

I had a very depressing response because I realized that these were my own people, these were Negroes throwing eggs at me. I'm concerned about the fact that maybe all of us have contributed to this by not working harder to get rid of the conditions, the poverty, the social isolation, and all of the conditions that cause individuals to respond like this.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

You cannot get complacent because there's someone out there working harder than you. So you got to keep pushing yourself to be an elite player.

Robert Horry

Those glories come too late That on our ashes wait.

Richard Lovelace

Rome, like Washington, is small enough, quiet enough, for strong personal intimacies; Rome, like Washington, has its democratic court and its entourage of diplomatic circle; Rome, like Washington, gives you plenty of time and plenty of sunlight. In New York we have annihilated both.

M. E. W. Sherwood

As mortals, we're ruled by conditions, not by ourselves.

Bodhidharma

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

Elizabeth Bowen

We'll go on vacation, but we don't really care to go see Rome or anything. We just want to play dominoes. We like the fact that we can say, 'Oh, we went to Rome.' 'Well, what'd you do in Rome?' 'Played dominoes'.