To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to… — 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
... liberal intellectualstend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping thatthose in… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep… — 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 the time. During these years, kids would live communally – doing some work, anyway being physically active, in the countryside(...) This simple change in the age specificity of schooling would a) reduce adolescent discontent, anomie, boredom,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
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
![“Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject… [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.” quote by Susan Sontag](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/fe1/susan-sontag-332_alienation_anthropology-has-always-struggled-with-a_15322.jpg)
