Susan Sontag Quotes

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people‘s reality, and eventually in one’s own.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms – the animation, the fits.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

What we need is to use what we have.

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty – of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

Volume depends precisely on the writer‘s having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

A family‘s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph – only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.