Particular Civilization Quotes by Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

We are ruled by quotations.

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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