Styles of Radical Will Quotes

“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

“I live in an unethical society that coarsens the sensibilities and thwarts the capacities for goodness of most people but makes available for minority consumption an astonishing array of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. Those who don’t enjoy (in both senses) my pleasures have every right, from their side, to regard my consciousness as spoiled, corrupt, decadent. I, from my side, can’t deny the immense richness of these pleasures, or my addiction to them.”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

“Elites presuppose masses.”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

“To look at something which is “empty” is still to be looking, still to be seeing something—if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations.”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

“To discuss the idea of silence in art is to discuss the various alternatives within this essentially unalterable situation. 4”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

“Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility); a dismantling of the artist’s competence, his responsible sense of vocation—and therefore as an aggression against them. Modern”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

“a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech,”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

“Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind’s need or capacity for self-estrangement.”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

“an expression of human consciousness, consciousness seeking to know itself.”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

“Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn.”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

“Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness.”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

“Something is neutral only with respect to something else—like an intention or an expectation.”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

“At the moment when “art” comes into being, the modern period of art begins.”
― Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will