quotes by Susan Sontag

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. "
— Susan Sontag

"The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."
— Susan Sontag (On Photography (Penguin Modern Classics))

"All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt."
— Susan Sontag

"Today everything exists to end in a photograph."
— Susan Sontag

"Sanity is a cozy lie."
— Susan Sontag

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."
— Susan Sontag

"Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager."
— Susan Sontag

""I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.""
— Susan Sontag

"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."
— Susan Sontag

"All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

"
— Susan Sontag

"All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt."
— Susan Sontag

"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious; not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
"
— Susan Sontag

""to take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."



(maybe quotes are silly but, i like that one a whole lot)"
— Susan Sontag (On Photography (Penguin Modern Classics))

"Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary. "
— Susan Sontag

"Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always “over there,” with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as the implacable, furtive menace. And “terrorist” is a more flexible word than “communist.” It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war will be endless---since there will always be some terrorism."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"Desire has no history..."
— Susan Sontag (On Photography (Penguin Modern Classics))