The really important thing is not to reject anything. Susan Sontag More Quotes by Susan Sontag More Quotes From Susan Sontag The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. Susan Sontag oppositeslyingideas All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to. Susan Sontag intelligentconversation War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent – war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. Susan Sontag eyewarpeace Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. Susan Sontag gunnaturepeople 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. Susan Sontag politicaldiseasereal The white race is the cancer of human history. Susan Sontag cancerracewhite The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall. Susan Sontag instantmaximsphotograph Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony. Susan Sontag creativetwoculture What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment. Susan Sontag modernkindart War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins. Susan Sontag riptearswar Rules of taste enforce structures of power. Susan Sontag aestheticstructuretaste The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences. Susan Sontag elementssilenceart Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings. Susan Sontag wingslove-isthinking The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque. Susan Sontag empathycitiesjoy It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. Susan Sontag world-sufferingaggravationsuffering A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once. Susan Sontag photographphotography Love dies because its birth was an error. Susan Sontag divorcebirtherrors Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are. Susan Sontag pornographystructureimagination Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past. Susan Sontag realitywaypast One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all. Susan Sontag intentionartistneeds
