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Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes

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Famous Susan Sontag Quotes

“The lover's photograph hidden in a married woman's wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent's bed, the campaign-button image of a politician's face pinned on a voter's coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver's children clipped to the visor--all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.”

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Book:On photography
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“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”

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Book:Regarding the Pain of Others
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“We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.”

ThinkingKnowsWritingMeanArtRealityLosesSpaceRoomsKnow HowFilledIntentionSmellStuckRoughAbandonedVolumeCavesArrowsTunnelsMean Words
Author:Susan Sontag
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“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.”

WayFeelsHumansHandsMoralCapableEvidenceCrueltyPsychologicalAdulthoodDepravityDisillusioned
Book:Regarding the Pain of Others
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“Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.”

FirstsMayBookSelfReasonBodyDesireConflictAngryAttractionDescriptionRepublicPassagesPlatoFoundingOverwhelmedUnworthyAcknowledgmentPlato S
Book:Regarding the Pain of Others
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“The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.”

IfsMomentsPastSocialSexCreationPureIdealsRelationAidsPartnersChainsIgnoredPerilTransmissionCoupling
Author:Susan Sontag
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“Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives. Cancerphobia taught us the fear of a polluting environment; now we have the fear of polluting people that AIDS anxiety inevitably communicates. Fear of the Communion cup, fear of surgery: fear of contaminated blood, whether Christ's blood or your neighbor's.”

PeopleUniverseChristEnvironmentBloodTaughtDiseaseAnxietyCommunicateSexualityAidsNeighborCupsCommunionSurgeryRegisterTaught Us
Author:Susan Sontag
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“The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.”

HumansWhiteRaceExistencePlanetsBalanceCivilizationCancerSpreadIdeologyUpsetHuman HistoryEcologicalAutonomousWhite RaceExistence Of LifeEcological Balance
Author:Susan Sontag
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“The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”

NeedsMayIdeasSpiritLyingGreaterBalanceTruth IsIntellectualOppositesConstantVaryThrustReposeDistortion
Book:A Susan Sontag reader
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“In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art , Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community.”

ArtSpiritualJoyEnergyGivenForceCommunityLeaderIdentityBenefitsArt IsIdealsPerfectionSexualityOfficialsCommunistFollowersContrastNaziAestheticsFascistsUtopianMagnetism
Book:A Susan Sontag reader
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“War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.”

YearsLongHas BeensWarHappensCultureRealizingCommunityResultsImagineGenerationsOne ThingEconomicPolicyVictoryEternalVictimIncludingDefeatDisasterRuinsRegionsAlasSerbia
Author:Susan Sontag
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“The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.”

WellsSelfRealitySeemsPartyDemocracyMediaCongressOfficialsMatureSovietRhetoricUnworthyCommentatorsConcealingUnanimitySanctimonious
Book:At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
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“If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there.”

IfsHumansPersonsArtLastsArtistConsciousnessCenturyDangerousPositionActivityTasksSecularFrontiersUnprecedentedStatureHuman ActivityAutonomousSecular Society
Author:Susan Sontag
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“Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.”

WayTryingKindImaginationReligiousLevelsTalkingSeriousIntellectualTasksPrimariesAgain And AgainTranslationsEnthusiasticRevivalHeadingsArdentWay Of Talking
Author:Susan Sontag
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“Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.”

IfsLongStillsTwoEnoughShowsWould BeFantasyShadowCrossesCamerasPhotographAlternativesGloriousNailsFadedPrototype
Book:On photography
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