One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I think that there is generally less of a community and that the fragmentation of the left is a symptom. I think… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art , Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in the sense that moral principles… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious… — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image