With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All… — 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
Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It's almost as if this is the fundamental procedure in modern society: duplication and recycling. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture,… — 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
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
Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less… — 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
