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

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

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