One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of… — 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
Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied. — 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
As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.” — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the… — 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