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War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent -- war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.


Susan Sontag

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War is no solution to peace.
BEN OAK Being present is being connected to All Things.
S. KELLEY HARRELL, M. DIV. War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences...
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE War is not the answer, and more people are feeling that as opposition is rising. We must join our he...
BOB BRAMMER Life is an audition.
THOMAS FLAJNIK - ANTICHIMERAPODAL For governments at war, the media is an instrument of war or an element in war that is to be control...
BRUCE JACKSON All's well that carries on well
AMIT ABRAHAM God and a soldier all people adore In time of war, but not before; And when war is over and al...
ANONYMOUS Don't talk to me about atrocities in war; all war is an atrocity.
LORD KITCHENER Don't talk to me about atrocities in war; all war is an atrocity
LORD KITCHENER Of course in war all madnesses come out in a man, that is the fault of war not of a man or a nation.
FRIEDA LAWRENCE It was never my intention to point out that war is good or war is bad. I just wanted to provide an e...
BRANDON SPECK When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. ...
ERIK PEVERNAGIE PEACE IS THE OBJECTIVE TO WAR, BUT THE BLOOD RUNNETH STILL
NATALIE URQUIETA War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself, as my generation learned ...
GUSTAV HEINEMANN It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civ...
JAMES CONNOLLY Training is an active, dynamic process lived out daily in all areas of life- not a rote exercise in ...
CRAIG GROESCHEL All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom w...
JOAN DIDION We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab and you had no warning. It...
COLSON WHITEHEAD Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better an...
KURT VONNEGUT In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, inde...
LEO TOLSTOY We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical ...
A. J. MUSTE Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will ...
YASSER ARAFAT I'm not so much a pacifist, I'm against imperialism. The war I fought in was an imperialist war, and...
DAVID MORRIS an inspiration on and off the football field, as with all who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war...
ABU GHRAIB Then the face of Big Brother faded away again and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out i...
GEORGE ORWELL Hiding in all the thorns, there is a yellow rose.
BEN OAK Homo homini lupis est.
PLAUTUS The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
EZRA POUND Again, in Wag the Dog, war has to be declared by an act of congress. But if you go to war, you don&#...
VAL KILMER Nothing is more precious than peace, by which all war, both in Heaven and Earth, is brought to an en...
IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH War is, in fact, an extension of politics, and in any war, military operations have to be conducted ...
H. R. MCMASTER War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and pat...
JOHN STUART MILL [About Susan Sontag] Her quest for meaning, for significance was endless. She described life more as...
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT It is a fatal error to enter any war without the will to win it. •Douglas MacArthur All great...
DOUGLAS MACARTHUR We must realistically accept that revolution is a social war, not because we like war, but because w...
PETER GELDERLOOS I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the ne...
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and t...
WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastro...
AGATHA CHRISTIE If we are to assume that North Korea becomes a nuclear-power state, of course the danger of having a...
LEE MYUNG-BAK Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive one; it is man and not materials that c...
MAO ZEDONG Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive one; it is man and not materials that c...
MAO TSE-TUNG As peace is of all goodness, so war is an emblem, a hieroglyphic, of all misery
JOHN DONNE When people say 'Lysistrata' has always been seen as an anti-war play, what's interestin...
DOUGLAS CARTER BEANE This beating is all part of the same war on Islam that the West is carrying out these days. The (Pro...
GAMAL BASHIR The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.
WALTER GOODMAN America is not fighting to win a war. We are fighting to give an application to an old Greek proverb...
ARTHUR J. GOLDBERG War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and pat...
JOHN STUART MILL We are at war - undeclared and of such a subtle nature that few have noticed - but war nevertheless....
JOHN MCAFEE Seeing, touching is believing!
THOMAS FLAJNIK - ANTICHIMERAPODAL SEO is DEAD in the eyes of the people who know LESS about it.
J. ORACOY I let out a sound that was definitely not a whimper. It was something far more manly, no matter what...
BRANDON SANDERSON It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget tha...
PRIMO LEVI War, not peace, produces virtue. War, not peace, purges vice. War, and preparation for war, call for...
STEVEN PRESSFIELD [For his part, retired Gen. Tommy Franks, who has been speaking out as a Bush surrogate, has an op-e...
TOMMY FRANKS The Democrats of the Sixties were all about making love and not war while a war-loving Republican is...
MICHELE ZIPP Listen up—there’s no war that will end all wars,’ Crow tells me. ‘War breeds war. Lapping up...
HARUKI MURAKAMI In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; ...
SUN TZU Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men co...
ELLEN KEY The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is ...
LESTER B. PEARSON The outcome of the war is in our hands; the outcome of words is in the council.
HOMER This 33-year period, which includes the Tripolitan War (1801-05) and the Algerine War (1815-16), is ...
FRANK LAMBERT A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in...
GERTRUDE STEIN War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and pat...
JOHN STUART MILL Mr. Speaker, I agree with those who say that the Global War on Terrorism is actually a Global War of...
MAC THORNBERRY Easter Island collapsed in not just an epidemic of civil war but cannibalism. Of all the collapses o...
JARED DIAMOND We live in an age that is driven by information. Technological breakthroughs... are changing the fac...
WILLIAM J. PERRY The situation could have spun out of control and the international community is working very hard to...
HELEN OLAFSDOTTIR All power is within you; you can do anything and everything. Believe in that, do not believe that yo...
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort o...
GEORGE ORWELL Sometimes war takes an arm, or an eye, or it takes two legs from us, but above all the war takes our...
MEHMET MURAT ILDAN Our life is a series of moments. Let them all go. Moments. All gathering towards this one.
NOW IS GOOD If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves...
RUTH BENEDICT But don't they say that all is fair in love and war? I heard that somewhere."
"'They?' Who are ...
JOHN CONNOLLY When I grew up, in Taiwan, the Korean War was seen as a good war, where America protected Asia. It w...
ANG LEE It's becoming plainer and plainer that what is going on in South America and in South-Eastern As...
ELMER DAVIS War is wrong. Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely t...
BAYARD RUSTIN I've said to the people at the White House that you say you need all the resources to fight the war ...
CHARLES SCHUMER Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society ma...
NAOMI WOLF ...men are poor soldiers in love's war. And it is a war-one that never ends.
ANDREA CREMER Like the rest of us, business leaders cannot figure out what will happen if war breaks out, and maki...
JOEL NAROFF There is a lot of work left to do; this war is far from over. Each day more and more people are spea...
LESLIE CAGAN In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and inta...
SUN TZU War is not one disaster of milions of people. War is milions of disasters of one person.
HANS VAN MIERLO Today A woman is one who tries to bring a man down. A man is one who has to keep that woman in check...
APURVA GAGLANI It is so fascinating that when after a hard stressful day we calm our mind and release the stress fr...
GARY F EVANS... Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War th...
NICK TURSE America's real plan is to fuel a civil war, while the national plan is for all Lebanese to live in p...
HASSAN NASRALLAH The authority to declare war rests in Congress, not in an out-of-control president.
TED CRUZ Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently di...
HAILE SELASSIE Seeing eye to an eye is a must, especially when there lies a case, or an intent, to meet; even by in...
PRIYAVRAT THAREJA When the war first broke out, I was commissioned to paint dozens of the 'Support our Troops' banners...
DIANE SCHMIDT A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war mean...
GEN. H. NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF Make no mistake, adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed.
HARLAN COBEN War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
GEORGE ORWELL Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all oppositi...
ROBERT M. LA FOLLETTE In some respects these presidents are very similar. In the Johnson-Nixon war the military was very m...
DAN DODD For many people, that war [WWII] is called the “good war” because it was fought against a regime...
NEL NODDINGS I have no intention of going to war with anybody, or taking an aggressive posture. This is simply lo...
COMMISSIONER LEE WEBERMAN We are seeing the most intense bargaining among big states that we have seen since the end of the Co...
GRAHAM ALLISON

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 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 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