The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.
Susan Sontag
Related The truth may not be told. Here is an acceptable lie. RACHEL HARTMAN Culture is nested in context, not genes. THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Rules governing defecation, hygiene, and pollution exist in every culture at every period in history... ROSE GEORGE It's considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and... EDWARD HIRSCH Judaism is a civilization. It has history, culture, literature. It has jokes, ... Part of any civili... CHARLES ISBELL There are many realities. There are many versions of what may appear obvious. Whatever appears ... AMISH TRIPATHI The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there ... WINSTON CHURCHILL Rape Culture is a culture where we are inundated, in different ways, by the idea that male aggressio... ROXANE GAY The two men had a conversation. Brief, cryptic, to the point. As though they had exchanged numbers a... ARUNDHATI ROY I deal with cultural issues whether they be in the Middle East, Far East, the Orient or the West. Yo... RAVI ZACHARIAS Our laws are reflection of our culture, and in our culture it's not acceptable to torture small anim... JOSEPH MOORE Divorce has become more commonplace in the popular culture - among celebrities and even public figur... DAVID POPENOE I believe that there is a Matrix and... to be more accurate I am in the Pornography Matrix. DEYTH BANGER the dogma that women using contraception must menstruate is changing, and (a reversible absence of b... LESLIE MILLER America is the only country capable of producing national movies: its culture has become a global cu... JEAN-JACQUES ANNAUD Only when the privileged classes perform military service, only when elite youth are on the firing l... CHARLES MOSKOS Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate fo... SUSAN SONTAG The fact that what we believe about marriage - that it should be between a man and a woman - and tha... ROBERT JEFFRESS 'Dare to Discipline' was published in 1970 in the midst of the Vietnam War and a culture of ... JAMES DOBSON Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more ... G. K. CHESTERTON Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more ... GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Thieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more ... G.K. CHESTERTON Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture ag... TERENCE MCKENNA In context, those comments might have seemed fairly acceptable. But the market goes by headlines, an... JANE FOLEY If we can start to say that's not acceptable in town, we can change that culture. ALICE JACKSON The coin that is most current among mankind is flattery: the only benefit of which is that by hearin... SOURCE UNKNOWN If something is wrong for you or me, it is also wrong for the cop, the soldier, the mayor, the gover... LLEWELLYN H. ROCKWELL JR. San Francisco has always been a place apart, and a center of eccentric and independent thinkers. And... LARRY HARVEY What is acceptable in our culture, I think, is really detrimental. I think we ought to have a little... CASEY AFFLECK There has been a shift to what may be defined as a culture of negativity which goes well beyond cove... ALASTAIR CAMPBELL That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from... LAWRENCE LESSIG When Ron Howard does 'Rush,' he has to learn and steep himself in F1 culture and European ra... JON FAVREAU It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally poss... NORTHROP FRYE reflect on the culture of intolerance that he may be promoting in his party and the country as a who... SHAMI CHAKRABARTI That ad has become as much a part of popular culture as the Energizer Bunny. ANDREW PUZDER Indeed, only what does not have a tangible measure can easily be exaggerated in importance. This is ... NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN I read somewhere that writers, as they get older, become more and more perfectionist. Which may be b... TOM WOLFE The United States and Turkey are the only two countries that don't have some kind of subsidy for the... ALEX NORTH We are accused of being obsessed by property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society an... JOHN BERGER Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you... C. JOYBELL C. It was not that long ago when the accepted wisdom in football was that the running game had to be es... FRANK DEFORD Regarding some of the issues raised by Mr. Salinger in recent days, they are again a combination of ... PETER GOELZ It would seem, therefore, that this constitutional safeguard may no longer serve its original purpos... JAMES L. BUCKLEY The really interesting moment will be when you have a critical mass of people engaging through the n... GEOFF MULGAN The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that's what's happened in ... MICHELLE OBAMA Times have changed. The world has changed around us. It's a lot more acceptable. CANDACE COMBS The insults against Prophet Muhammad are not the result of freedom of opinion but because what is sa... AYMAN AL-ZAWAHRI Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological an... KATE MILLET Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological an... KATE MILLETT The United States and Turkey are the only two countries that don't have some kind of subsidy for... ALEX NORTH Most people would find it bizarre to speak of tolerating blonds. For whatever reason, hair color ha... DAVID KELLEY Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyon... P. J. O'ROURKE What is the relation between Christianity and modern culture; may Christianity be maintained in a sc... JOHN GRESHAM MACHEN A Jewish food is one that is almost sanctified, either by its repeated use or use within the holiday... GIL MARKS When we share the ball like that, we're a hard team to play. We attacked the basket and when you pla... JOEY MEYER Marriage finally became acceptable to the churches when laws were established that could make it a m... BARBARA G. WALKER Numerically speaking, half the population cannot be a minority. Yet when it comes to women, the numb... GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON The question is not only what is grown but what it's used for. There's not going to be a mas... SUSAN GEORGE All higher education belongs only to the exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so hig... FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Its culture: the fruit of its life, the product of its own efforts in thought and art. This culture ... CORNELIU ZELEA CODREANU The danger in coming back at that is you're repeating it. Now, what you may try to do is come back a... DAN HEDGES I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ... KELLY JONES Are we sitting back like couch potatoes and watching the systemic elimination of all the lines that ... JOE LIEBERMAN What we mean when we say that something is "cultural" is that it is roughly similar to what we find ... PASCAL BOYER Rap culture is interesting and different and has purpose but it has a non-romantic view of life and ... HAL DAVID They were in a better condition, acknowledging only a terror above them flaming on that unknown moun... GEORGE MACDONALD Our culture has become something that is completely and utterly in love with its parent. It's become... MALCOLM MCLAREN It's become embedded in the culture that everyone is entitled to a little bit of luxury. CANDACE CORLETT Truth no longer matters in the context of politics and, sadly, in the context of cable news. AARON BROWN How long that will last is another question because if they become more and more secure, they may, i... ROBERT KAGAN Once you become an elaborate and well-developed culture, anything from Rome or the Etruscans, for th... MARIO BATALI Academics would become trapped in the rigid economic theories of foreign countries, which are not ap... YANUAR RIZKY They are all parts of time, and the past and future are created species of time, which we unconsciou... PLATO Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture s... NAOMI WOLF In a world of cell phones and satellite feeds - a world in which the president can sit in the White ... DAVID HORSEY Being present is being connected to All Things. S. KELLEY HARRELL, M. DIV. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when th... LAWRENCE LESSIG Tumblr culture and the whole reappropriation-without-context thing are a double-edged sword in that ... BRYAN LEE O'MALLEY Tumblr culture and the whole reappropriation-without-context thing are a double-edged sword in that ... BRYAN LEE O'MALLEY You don't have to become an investment banker as a way of demonstrating that education has worke... FRANCIS SPUFFORD When interest rates rise, the rate gap with the U.S. will narrow and that will provide pressure for ... JEFFREY TAN I find it difficult to judge myself, but people say that I have become a bit more socially acceptabl... JO BRAND The basic commitment is that the basic structure of the North Stand will be completed for the one-da... ROBERT BRYAN Through our maps, we willingly become a part of their boundaries. If our home is included, we feel p... DEBBIE LEE WESSELMANN How do you know if something is real? That’s easy. Does it change you? Does it form you? Does it g... C. JOYBELL C. Those who lie and cheat, but do not believe what they are doing to be wrong, may be living according... PETER SINGER Grant that I may become beautiful in my soul within, and that all my external possessions may be in ... PLATO Enormous slaughter may have been acceptable in previous centuries. It simply isn't acceptable an... EDWARD LUCK When a young pianist hits a wrong note, we don’t say he is not worthy to keep practicing. We don�... BRAD WILCOX Every high school and college graduate in America should, I think, have some familiarity with statis... NICHOLAS KRISTOF Put your mind to it and you will do it. This is how the impossible become possible SOTONYE ANGA Peugeot, which used to be lukewarm in China, is gearing up now. Peugeot may record faster sales grow... YALE ZHANG Culture, what you believe, what you value, how you live matters. Now, as fundamental as these princi... MITT ROMNEY The battle is not physical, it is spiritual and your mind is the battleground. Keep your mind pure a... JEANETTE CORON Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that ... TIMOTHY J. KELLER There are a lot of ramifications and invasion-of-privacy issues. We basically tell the students what... DANIELLE CLARK The online musical universe has become Balkanized, with many sites focusing on minute niches. That w... MICHAEL AZERRAD It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is soc... RICHARD DAWKINS It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is so... RICHARD DAWKINS
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 Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, e... 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 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