Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . .… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of… — 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
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility. — 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
Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament. — 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
Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no… — 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
