Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

Essayist, Critic, Activist

Susan Sontag was an influential American writer and thinker, known for her critical essays on art, culture, and politics.

Art Photography Writing People World Thinking
Born
January 16, 1933
Died
September 28, 2004
Quotes
540
Rank
#561

Quote collection

Susan Sontag quotes (page 12 of 27)

540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Susan Sontag Essayist, Critic, Activist
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"I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account of how she defied, and helped others to defy, radical Islam's war against women. Her memoir contains important and properly complex reflections about the ravages of theocracy, about thoughtfulness, and about the ordeals of freedom-as well as a stirring account of the pleasures and deepening of consciousness that result from an encounter with great literature and with an inspired teacher."

Teacher War Reflection
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"War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather."

War Weather Affair
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"Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching."

Distance Suffering Way
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"Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip."

Oddities Judgment Accumulation
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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."

War Years Long
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"What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern."

Modern Interest
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"In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation."

Art Style Finals
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"The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities."

Men History Becoming
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"Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture."

Mass Culture Age Matter
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"The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony."

Two Minorities Moral
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"It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making."

Powerful Thinking Finals
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"I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up."

Wake Up Passionate Engagement
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"Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation."

Psychics Fiction Literature
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"Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies."

Real Book Ideas
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"With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses."

Cancer Moving Passion
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"And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy."

Mean Laughing Perfection
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"Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own."

Everyday Able May
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"Taste has no system and no proofs."

Taste Proof
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