Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art. — 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
Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . .… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue - my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically.… — 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
I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account of how she defied, and helped others to defy, radical Islam's war against… — 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
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