“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.” — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness - pushing us at intervals close to… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject… [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
“Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
