Susan Sontag quotes - page 2

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility. (Susan Sontag)
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
Susan Sontag
Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
Susan Sontag
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.
Susan Sontag
I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
Susan Sontag
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Susan Sontag
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future. (Susan Sontag)
The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this?
Susan Sontag
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility.
Susan Sontag
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
My library is an archive of longings.
Susan Sontag
Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.
Susan Sontag
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy. (Susan Sontag)
We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.
Susan Sontag
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
Susan Sontag
What we need is to use what we have.
Susan Sontag
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
Susan Sontag