Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
Susan Sontag
Related All the creams, chemicals, gels, sprays and fairness creams, all the lotions and tubes produced by m... APURVA GAGLANI Diseases are not cured by giving them a name. MARTY RUBIN For the same reason a disease cannot be cured by more of the germ that caused it, the inflation and ... RON PAUL Love is a serious mental and physical disease, it affects your thoughts, behavior, acts, speech etc.... KLEINJAN REDELINGHUYS In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was larg... EULA BISS She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag] MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ... CAITLIN MORAN First of all, many human diseases are influenced by, if not caused by mutations in genes. DANIEL NATHANS A lot of human diseases are caused by multiple gene mutations that are difficult to identify. JEF BOEKE She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag] MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not full... SHERWIN B. NULAND And it is of course true that pharmacologists are producing a great many new wonder drugs where the ... ALDOUS HUXLEY Many diseases may be cured by abstinence. THOMAS CARLYLE All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease,... ECKHART TOLLE Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it is not cured by medication. De... IRVING KIRSCH Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag. SUSAN SONTAG A carrier with a venereal disease can have many partners, but only those whose mental and physical i... LOUISE L. HAY Love is a disease which cannot be cured by medicinal herbs. VIKRANT PARSAI There's no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real,accelerating and caused by human act... BILL CLINTON 90% of relationship issues are caused by misunderstandings, 9.9% by conflicts of interest. Luckily, ... STEFAN EMUNDS When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured. ANTON CHEKHOV Not only is the actual word "hysteria" gendered — it once referred to an exclusively female diseas... SADY DOYLE Our personal experiences and mental reasoning skills establish the range of our perception of realit... KILROY J. OLDSTER I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t... SALLY MANN With political resolve and strong public health partnerships, Maine has set an example for all state... EDWARD MILLER I certainly feel that the time is not far distant when a knowledge of the principles of diet will be... FANNIE FARMER Pain Is Caused By Pleasure SULLY ERNA Physical jobs will be done by robots and mental jobs will be done by smart computers. IAN PEARSON By similar things a disease is produced and through the application of the like it is cured. HIPPOCRATES Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami... CAITLIN MORAN I certainly feel that the time is not far distant when a knowledge of the principles of diet will be... FANNIE FARMER Physical brains are subject to the laws of physics; mental states are subject to the laws of logic. ... J. WARNER WALLACE Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily ap... VLADIMIR NABOKOV When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured. ANTON CHEKHOV These days we are all pained by the disaster caused by the hurricane in the United States of America... BENEDICT XVI Diseases of the eye are to bee cured with the elbow. GEORGE HERBERT How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself. WILL DURANT It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opini... ERIC HOFFER It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opi... ERIC HOFFER Our lives say much more about how we think than our books do. The theories we preach are not always ... R.C. SPROUL Disease is, in essence, the result of conflict between soul and mind, and will never be eradicated e... EDWARD BACH He who considers disease results to be the disease itself, and expects to do away with these as dise... JAMES TYLER KENT A man's penmanship is an unfailing index of his character, moral and mental, and a criterion by whic... PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE Ghettos have their own characteristics and consequences : be they physical. social, intellectua... TARIQ RAMADAN Things are much, much better, but it caused physical and mental anguish, and it caused stress on our... DARLENE ROBERTS Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of ... A. J. REB MATERI In the real world, 90% of the money spent on medical research is focused on conditions that are resp... PETER SINGER The question is not, will there be difficulties and threats to our existence, but how will we deal w... BERNIE SIEGEL Whatever is deeply, essentially female--the life in a woman's expression, the feel of her flesh, the... NAOMI WOLF One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority b... SIGMUND FREUD The tremendous acquisition of basic knowledge will allow a much more rational treatment of cancer, v... GUNTER BLOBEL They understood that brave men could be injured more by pity than by disease. DAN GROAT Diseases are caused by viruses and bacteria. If the body doesn't happen to have those viruses or bac... GLENN MORRIS The only deadly disease I have seen that is causing great harm and massacre latently yet the world h... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH I believe that much of the world's sorrow is caused by people who are this, but allow themselves to ... , FROM THE MOVIE "HAROLD & MAUDE" The problem for me is that I can't ever really see who Gregory is, any more than I can see what a mi... ELIZABETH CHANDLER The African Union has to act in order to put an end to armed conflicts that undermine the continent,... OMAR BONGO The failure to properly address the modern plague caused by HIV is an act of (irresponsibility) that... DAVID HO ...and remember my sentimental friend that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how mu... L. FRANK BAUM Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities. WALTER SCOTT Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities. SIR WALTER SCOTT It is not unusual for them to be subjected to financial exploitation by people who use threats of ph... LYNN BARNES Electricity is the power that causes all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else. AMBROSE BIERCE Heart disease continues to be the number one killer; cancer, the number 2 killer, not far behind. Th... ARLEN SPECTER Feast of Mary, Martha & Lazarus, Companions of Our Lord The practical problem of Christian polit... C. S. LEWIS A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. ... LAWRENCE LESSIG A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others. FRANK MORGAN A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others L. FRANK BAUM 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 It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's. SUSAN SONTAG With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - li... SUSAN SONTAG What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-re... SUSAN SONTAG No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain. SUSAN SONTAG Tests on the bodies are being done to ascertain whether the deaths were caused by the disease. JAMES NYIKAL Ambition is like a plague that can only be cured by success. TERRANCE ROBINSON- ARTIST EDUCATOR SCHOLAR ENTREPRENEUR A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by... VIKTOR E. FRANKL Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of... CHARLES DE SECONDAT Facts quite often, I fear to confess, like lawyers, put me to sleep at noon. Not theories, however. ... RAY BRADBURY Disease and ill health are caused largely by damage at the molecular and cellular level, yet today... RALPH MERKLE Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a... SALMAN RUSHDIE Ah me! Love can not be cured by herbs. OVID Sex may be an expression of love. However, where sex exists, love may not always find a place. Sex m... RAYKA KUMRU There is a basic incompatibility between the two activities: Whoever is worried about stability fear... GUIDO TABELLINI God is not an actor within the larger scheme of things. He is not a muscle-bound Jupiter, bullying t... DOUGLAS WILSON When are we going to say cancer is cured? I'm not sure when that will happen, if that will happe... DAVID BALTIMORE The most chronic heart disease is caused by having greediness in your heart. Go for check ups regula... ISRAELMORE AYIVOR The power to live long is by learning to develop a positive mental attitude about issues of life. DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) The notion that you can endanger your physical and mental health by letting strong passions go unsat... JOSEPH B. WIRTHLIN To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can... LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH [About Susan Sontag] Her quest for meaning, for significance was endless. She described life more as... MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Mental illness is an equal-opportunity illness. Every one of us is impacted by mental illness. One i... MARGARET LARSON I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling ... A. S. BYATT All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy. ALFRED E. SMITH All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy. ALFRED SMITH All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy. ALFRED EMANUEL SMITH All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy. AL SMITH Unfortunately, we do not often see the advantages in the power of values and virtues. We are easily ... SUNDAY ADELAJA
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 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 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