Top 100 Susan Sontag Quotes
#1. Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
#2. Nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.
Susan Sontag
#4. Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Susan Sontag
#5. War has been the norm and peace the exception
Susan Sontag
#6. Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Susan Sontag
#7. I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.
Susan Sontag
#8. All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
Susan Sontag
#9. There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
Susan Sontag
#10. Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Susan Sontag
#11. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
Susan Sontag
#12. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
Susan Sontag
#13. If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.
Susan Sontag
#14. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
Susan Sontag
#15. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.
Susan Sontag
#16. For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer.
Susan Sontag
#17. The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.
Susan Sontag
#18. The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
Susan Sontag
#19. One of art photography's most vigorous enterprises
[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate
but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
Susan Sontag
#20. Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.
Susan Sontag
#21. Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
Susan Sontag
#22. I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
#23. I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
Susan Sontag
#24. Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
Susan Sontag
#25. Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.
Susan Sontag
#26. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people.
Susan Sontag
#27. Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don't have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up - up, up. And ... down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I'm on my feet again. See, I'm starting to roll it up again. Don't try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.
Susan Sontag
#29. It's not love that the past needs in order to survive, it's an absence of choices.
Susan Sontag
#30. A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent - more important than any words.
Susan Sontag
#31. It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
Susan Sontag
#32. A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
Susan Sontag
#33. A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue - my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of the good an idol - is open to the charge of being still caught within the dialectic of idolatry. I've made a moral criticism of my moral consciousness. Meta-idolatry.
Susan Sontag
#34. Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
Susan Sontag
#35. There does come a point when you have to acknowledge you're no longer postponing something and you really have made a choice.
Susan Sontag
#37. The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.
Susan Sontag
#38. Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)
Susan Sontag
#39. Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
Susan Sontag
#40. As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
Susan Sontag
#41. In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
Susan Sontag
#42. The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game
Susan Sontag
#43. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
#44. Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
Susan Sontag
#45. Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
Susan Sontag
#46. Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Susan Sontag
#47. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
Susan Sontag
#49. Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.
Susan Sontag
#50. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
Susan Sontag
#51. Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more.
Susan Sontag
#52. A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
Susan Sontag
#53. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
Susan Sontag
#54. In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.
Susan Sontag
#55. People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
Susan Sontag
#56. Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it.
Susan Sontag
#57. Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.
Susan Sontag
#58. Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
Susan Sontag
#59. Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology ...
Susan Sontag
#60. To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.
Susan Sontag
#61. There's no changing the way people are. No one changes, everyone knows that.
Susan Sontag
#62. The reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by camera
Susan Sontag
#63. Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.
Susan Sontag
#64. That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
Susan Sontag
#65. Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.
Susan Sontag
#66. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag
#67. The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.
Susan Sontag
#68. So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
Susan Sontag
#69. In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.
Susan Sontag
#70. The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication
Susan Sontag
#71. With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease
because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
Susan Sontag
#72. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.
Susan Sontag
#73. Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
Susan Sontag
#74. The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
Susan Sontag
#75. Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Susan Sontag
#76. Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
Susan Sontag
#77. If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.
Susan Sontag
#78. America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.
Susan Sontag
#79. Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
Susan Sontag
#80. Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
Susan Sontag
#81. No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
Susan Sontag
#82. Walking onto his terrace those first months to see in the distance the well-behaved mountain sitting under the sun might provoke a reverie about the calm that follows catastrophe.
Susan Sontag
#83. Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Susan Sontag
#84. Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.
Susan Sontag
#85. When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.
Susan Sontag
#86. Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
Susan Sontag
#87. The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Susan Sontag
#88. Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
Susan Sontag
#89. We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
Susan Sontag
#91. Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.
Susan Sontag
#92. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. OSCAR WILDE, in a letter
Susan Sontag
#93. Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
Susan Sontag
#94. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
#95. Image of an image of an image ... But to record all the dips and upswings, in a sense falsifies them, and I start deluding myself and thinking all this is, or might be, real. Enough to play the game, or try to play it. A mistake to tally up the score.
Susan Sontag
#96. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.
Susan Sontag
#97. The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.
Susan Sontag
#98. When the right person does the wrong thing, it's the right thing.
Susan Sontag
#99. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
Susan Sontag
#100. I've become passive. I don't invent, I don't yearn. I manage, I cope.
Susan Sontag
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