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Mean Quotes by Susan Sontag

18 Mean quotes by Susan Sontag

All Mean quotes Susan Sontag’s page

When you consider the idea of the mean as a cultural and ethical gauge, Susan Sontag’s essays and interviews provide a sharp, often unsettling lens. Her observations cut through complacency, urging readers to question what “average” really means in art, politics, and everyday life.

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Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.

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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.

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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

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Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me…

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There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.

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Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the…

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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like…

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I feel inauthentic at a party. ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented…

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The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience…

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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what…

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Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . .…

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Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look…

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“We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And…

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It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have…

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To us, the difference between the # photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the…

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Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch…

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Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always “over there,” with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as…

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More by Susan Sontag

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

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We are ruled by quotations.

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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or…

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Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a…

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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject… [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner…

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“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…

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To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never…

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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this…

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Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have…

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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the…

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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb.…

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The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but…

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Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo-Conservatives.

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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…

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