Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.


Susan Sontag

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America's greatest strength has always been its hopeful vision of human progress.
JOHN MCCAIN
She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT
to the victor go the spoils
THE AMERICA
The traditional American family has always been the foundation for success in America.
BILL O'REILLY
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG
For Nation States, and the adversaries within America's boarders (special interest groups, cyber cal...
AMERICA
Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ...
CAITLIN MORAN
America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.
OSCAR WILDE
America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up
OSCAR WILDE
There has not been a war in South America for fifty years, and I have every confidence that the coun...
FRANK B. KELLOGG
America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted...
LOUIS D. BRANDEIS
The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be te...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Business is at the heart of America and always has been.
DAVID A. SIEGEL
She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT
Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
The strength and power and goodness of America has always been based on the strength and power and g...
MITT ROMNEY
Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land...
DANIEL BELL
America needs NATO in this situation. It will take pressure off America and the idea that America is...
AMYAS GODFREY
That fallacy flies in the face of studies that show, every day, in every way, things are getting a l...
HAROLD WASHINGTON
I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t...
SALLY MANN
Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami...
CAITLIN MORAN
From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in Ame...
NATASHA TRETHEWEY
Every woman in America has a French dream in her head, especially a Parisian one.
CATHERINE MALANDRINO
While America has always been and always will be a safe harbor for those being persecuted by tyranni...
BILL SHUSTER
House music originated in America, and it has always been around, but I guess it just got a tighter ...
AVICII
Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.
FANNIE FARMER
Is America truly a democracy? Has America ever been a democracy with the institution of slavery?
TATYANA ALI
The American Dream has been defended, in every generation, by the brave men and women willing to fig...
LEON PANETTA
I think my whole life has been shaped by my childhood incarceration in America's concentration c...
GEORGE TAKEI
Without God there could be no American form of government nor an American way of life. Recognition o...
DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER
Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.
ITALO CALVINO
Every audience has its character; I like America - they love me. I suffer from stage fright, but in ...
ANDREA BOCELLI
My heart has always been truly convinced that in serving the cause of America, I am fighting for the...
MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE
What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.
JERRY GARCIA
[Motor racing has been] damaged, maybe irrevocably so in North America
FRANK WILLIAMS
The drug war has been a war where the direct casualties have primarily been America's poor; Amer...
CORY BOOKER
For almost a century, there has been broad consensus in America that families should spend no more t...
MATTHEW DESMOND
I think corporate America has realized in large part that human beings by their very nature are greg...
MARK WEISS
Until America begins to build a moral record in her dealings with the Indian people she should not t...
VINE DELORIA JR.
Africans who immigrate to America know how little racism exists there. They suspect it before emigra...
DENNIS PRAGER
When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South A...
MALCOLM X
Everybody in America has been dependent on the government at some time. We owe everybody in America ...
ANDREW YOUNG
In America profit is everything. They would never suspect honor. Money, greed, even revenge. But nev...
MISHA
More people are killed by stray bullets every day in America than have been killed by Ebola here. Mo...
ROBERT REICH
The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, had been devastated by neoliberal economic policies.
NOAM CHOMSKY
In many ways, America is on the receiving end of a pendulum that has been swung with great force, an...
HENRY ROLLINS
My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.
LANGSTON HUGHES
Fourth, to assure every entrepreneur and every job creator that their investments in America will no...
MITT ROMNEY
I think Newark has been in the crosshairs in every generation of the fight to achieve America. And I...
CORY BOOKER
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: Amer...
E. E. (EDWARD ESTLIN) CUMMINGS
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: Amer...
E. E. CUMMINGS
The World War I Years: America Becomes a World Power.
AMERICAN LIBRARY
In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
BARACK OBAMA
I don't even think that you can call Iron Maiden 100% real metal. Iron Maiden is beyond that and alw...
BRUCE DICKINSON
Every family in America knows they have to do a budget. Every small business in America knows they h...
JOHN BOEHNER
Human progress has always been driven by a sense of adventure and unconventional thinking.
ANDRE GEIM
In America you can always find a party. In Russia the party always finds you.
YAKOV SMIRNOFF
It's an all American story. The little guy becomes the big guy. Kinsey changes America. America was ...
SALLY DEERING
Military force is always this nation's last option, ... Yet if force becomes necessary to disarm Ira...
JEB BUSH
Our standing in Latin America has never been so low as it is now.
WAYNE SMITH
In America, she always had a much bigger following.
FABIANO CANOSA
Certainly coming to America has been extraordinary.
TIM ROTH
If, in our haste to 'progress,' the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and pol...
STEWART UDALL
Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. E...
NICHOLAS KRISTOF
By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America d...
BILL COSBY
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: Amer...
E. E. CUMMINGS
America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That's the nature of America, I think.
JERRY GARCIA
In the past five years, there has been a huge surge in culinary cruises, with Holland America quickl...
ERIK WOLF
The world is very lucky to have America. It's got to be the first time in the whole history of t...
BILL BRYSON
No state, as a matter of public policy, should turn back the clock on progress by, in effect, legali...
DANNEL MALLOY
War, in some instances, especially defensive, has been authorized by Heaven.
EZRA STILES
The borrow-spend-and-centralize agenda that has been so destructive to job creation elsewhere in Ame...
ELAINE CHAO
When exactly did every housewife in America become a whore?
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN
I have always been really troubled by the amount of poverty in America. Americans are matched in the...
MATTHEW DESMOND
America was first colonized by Puritans. Most of our earliest immigrants, and many since, have come ...
JAMES FREY
In this America, too, the Christian teaching that every human soul is unique and precious has been s...
ROSS DOUTHAT
A senator can be wrong for 20 years without consequence to the nation, ... But a president, a presid...
DICK CHENEY
I think every agent in America is calling.
BARBARA WALTERS
It's always been a dream for most Italians to come see America.
ALFONSO NUNZIANTE
Materialism has never been so ominous as now in North America, as management takes over.
ARTHUR ERICKSON
The starting point for the new history, both in Europe and America, has been the record of births, m...
EDMUND MORGAN
Long droughts have been implicated in the collapse of many ancient civilizations on virtually every ...
BRIAN CUMMING
The truth is there are two hundred white women raped in America by a black man for every one black w...
DAVID DUKE
Globalization has been very good to Corporate America.
JOSEPH QUINLAN
In the last couple of years, it has done incredible business in every major city across America. The...
CAMERON MACKINTOSH
Even when America's economy has been by all measures healthy and the unemployment rate low, some...
ELAINE CHAO
Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society ma...
NAOMI WOLF
The first time I landed in New York and got a cab to my hotel, I was completely struck by it: a feel...
AMERICA FERRERA
I'm not going to miss wearing the braces very much.
AMERICA FERRERA
When my mother was born on 14 April, he named her after a Latin American holiday, the Day of America...
AMERICA FERRERA
What's so kind of beautiful about the whole thing was that everything that made me not right for...
AMERICA FERRERA
My siblings are my best friends.
AMERICA FERRERA
If I learned anything from Betty coming into my life, it's to just be open to all the things tha...
AMERICA FERRERA
I miss Betty madly. I loved her. Whenever people talk about her, I get really nostalgic. There are p...
AMERICA FERRERA
I really hate the duties of being a celebrity, like getting dressed up for the red carpet.
AMERICA FERRERA
I realized how Latina I was, and then also, at the same time, how not Latina enough I was, because I...
AMERICA FERRERA
I think Hispanic women are beautiful with their curves. I'm not sure who feels that way in Holly...
AMERICA FERRERA
I was an open, smiley and gregarious child. I could make friends in 30 seconds wherever I went.
AMERICA FERRERA
When you finish a series like 'Ugly Betty,' there are so many voices around you telling you ...
AMERICA FERRERA
What I would say is that vows and rings don't change anything: the challenges are the same. Ever...
AMERICA FERRERA

More Susan Sontag

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considere...
SUSAN SONTAG
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.
SUSAN SONTAG
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write...
SUSAN SONTAG
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precio...
SUSAN SONTAG
It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the fin...
SUSAN SONTAG
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating th...
SUSAN SONTAG
War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is,...
SUSAN SONTAG
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the...
SUSAN SONTAG
Al forms of consensus about great books and perennial problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate...
SUSAN SONTAG
American energy is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chro...
SUSAN SONTAG
The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of A...
SUSAN SONTAG
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own expe...
SUSAN SONTAG
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the ra...
SUSAN SONTAG
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading towa...
SUSAN SONTAG
What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...
SUSAN SONTAG
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
SUSAN SONTAG
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The questio...
SUSAN SONTAG
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."

[Speech upon being awa...
SUSAN SONTAG
Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
SUSAN SONTAG
Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more ...
SUSAN SONTAG
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou...
SUSAN SONTAG
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. I...
SUSAN SONTAG
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
SUSAN SONTAG
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
SUSAN SONTAG
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less inter...
SUSAN SONTAG
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontroll...
SUSAN SONTAG
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
SUSAN SONTAG
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be ...
SUSAN SONTAG
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
SUSAN SONTAG
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s...
SUSAN SONTAG
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
SUSAN SONTAG
Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
SUSAN SONTAG
In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
SUSAN SONTAG
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains o...
SUSAN SONTAG
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub...
SUSAN SONTAG
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
SUSAN SONTAG
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full hu...
SUSAN SONTAG
Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative...
SUSAN SONTAG
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
SUSAN SONTAG
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
SUSAN SONTAG
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the...
SUSAN SONTAG
Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of men...
SUSAN SONTAG
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms,...
SUSAN SONTAG
Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.
SUSAN SONTAG
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting...
SUSAN SONTAG
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG
Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence,...
SUSAN SONTAG
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It ...
SUSAN SONTAG
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder...
SUSAN SONTAG
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a pa...
SUSAN SONTAG
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
SUSAN SONTAG
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG
Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us...
SUSAN SONTAG
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone n...
SUSAN SONTAG
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion ...
SUSAN SONTAG
What we need is to use what we have.
SUSAN SONTAG
Sanity is a cozy lie.
SUSAN SONTAG
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
SUSAN SONTAG
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized,...
SUSAN SONTAG
The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and...
SUSAN SONTAG
Taste has no system and no proofs.
SUSAN SONTAG
The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture...
SUSAN SONTAG
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves....
SUSAN SONTAG
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking o...
SUSAN SONTAG
I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kind...
SUSAN SONTAG
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
SUSAN SONTAG
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability....
SUSAN SONTAG
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people t...
SUSAN SONTAG
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
SUSAN SONTAG
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
SUSAN SONTAG
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of...
SUSAN SONTAG
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
SUSAN SONTAG
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
SUSAN SONTAG
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
SUSAN SONTAG
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists...
SUSAN SONTAG
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
SUSAN SONTAG
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine w...
SUSAN SONTAG
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
SUSAN SONTAG
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less intere...
SUSAN SONTAG
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the s...
SUSAN SONTAG
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured m...
SUSAN SONTAG
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
SUSAN SONTAG
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wis...
SUSAN SONTAG
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
SUSAN SONTAG
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc...
SUSAN SONTAG
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past...
SUSAN SONTAG
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, th...
SUSAN SONTAG
My library is an archive of longings.
SUSAN SONTAG
We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the cal...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own exper...
SUSAN SONTAG
We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if n...
SUSAN SONTAG
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the...
SUSAN SONTAG
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after yea...
SUSAN SONTAG
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams
SUSAN SONTAG
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really h...
SUSAN SONTAG
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p...
SUSAN SONTAG
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on va...
SUSAN SONTAG
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an ind...
SUSAN SONTAG
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to w...
SUSAN SONTAG
Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
SUSAN SONTAG
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational term...
SUSAN SONTAG
The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in...
SUSAN SONTAG
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p...
SUSAN SONTAG
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle...
SUSAN SONTAG
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remai...
SUSAN SONTAG
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a pass...
SUSAN SONTAG
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular style. It is the love of the exagge...
SUSAN SONTAG
'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love o...
SUSAN SONTAG
It is not the position, but the disposition.
SUSAN SONTAG
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions
SUSAN SONTAG
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by...
SUSAN SONTAG
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Pre...
SUSAN SONTAG
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
SUSAN SONTAG
Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more l...
SUSAN SONTAG
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
SUSAN SONTAG
All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memor...
SUSAN SONTAG
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion o...
SUSAN SONTAG
American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
SUSAN SONTAG
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or t...
SUSAN SONTAG
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s...
SUSAN SONTAG
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citiz...
SUSAN SONTAG
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [...
SUSAN SONTAG
People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens...
SUSAN SONTAG
So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympath...
SUSAN SONTAG
All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If ...
SUSAN SONTAG
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which doe...
SUSAN SONTAG
Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs ar...
SUSAN SONTAG
Desire has no history...
SUSAN SONTAG
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism...
SUSAN SONTAG
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--on...
SUSAN SONTAG
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics...
SUSAN SONTAG
Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, dri...
SUSAN SONTAG
How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!
SUSAN SONTAG
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel...
SUSAN SONTAG
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the ...
SUSAN SONTAG
I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
SUSAN SONTAG
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen c...
SUSAN SONTAG
[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.
SUSAN SONTAG
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...
SUSAN SONTAG
Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate fo...
SUSAN SONTAG
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
SUSAN SONTAG
Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extensi...
SUSAN SONTAG
Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
SUSAN SONTAG
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth read...
SUSAN SONTAG
All photographs are memento mori.
SUSAN SONTAG
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art / and, by analogy, our own exper...
SUSAN SONTAG
The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual dis...
SUSAN SONTAG
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize,
SUSAN SONTAG
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc...
SUSAN SONTAG
This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of b...
SUSAN SONTAG
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG
It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow t...
SUSAN SONTAG
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged,...
SUSAN SONTAG
The Way We Live Now
SUSAN SONTAG
Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that...
SUSAN SONTAG
In the final analysis, ''style'' is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of styli...
SUSAN SONTAG
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
SUSAN SONTAG
With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
SUSAN SONTAG
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
SUSAN SONTAG
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its "vi...
SUSAN SONTAG
Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to det...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by ne...
SUSAN SONTAG
It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking...
SUSAN SONTAG
But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybo...
SUSAN SONTAG
Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled re...
SUSAN SONTAG
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other pe...
SUSAN SONTAG
One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The na...
SUSAN SONTAG
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations...
SUSAN SONTAG
[Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste...
SUSAN SONTAG
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
SUSAN SONTAG
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
SUSAN SONTAG
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG
Perversity is the muse of modern literature
SUSAN SONTAG
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual ...
SUSAN SONTAG
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou...
SUSAN SONTAG
My idea of a writer: someone interested in 'everything,'
SUSAN SONTAG
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them
SUSAN SONTAG
The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth. . . the pollution of...
SUSAN SONTAG
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
SUSAN SONTAG
A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. ...
SUSAN SONTAG