Quotes by Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and political activist

Alive from: 1933-2004

Category: Politics | Writers (Contemporary)

Quotes 1 till 15 of 59.

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

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  Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.

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

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  A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

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  A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of ''spirit'' over matter.

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

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  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.

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  Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

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

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

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  Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

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

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  Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

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  Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular kind of style. It is love of the exaggerated.

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  Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.