We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.

Susan Sontag

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

Susan Sontag

endure easier changed

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Susan Sontag

women beautiful beauty

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

kissing inspiring inspirational

The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.

Susan Sontag

cancer white civilization

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

Susan Sontag

accepting understanding world

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.

Susan Sontag

moments photograph time

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

cameras gun people

...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

Susan Sontag

photograph photography

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

Susan Sontag

modern-life loss culture

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.

Susan Sontag

sadness sorrow wings

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

Susan Sontag

care intelligent people

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

Susan Sontag

photograph life-is

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Susan Sontag

transformation self people

The quote is always fascinating because it changes out of context, becomes different and sometimes more mysterious. It has a directness and assertiveness it may not have had in the original. I think the quality of inaccessibility, the mystery, is important - that whatever matters can't be taken in on just one reading or one seeing. This is certainly a quality of the little of art that lasts.

Susan Sontag

taken reading art

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

Susan Sontag

photography reality ideas

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

Susan Sontag

photography lust inspire

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

Susan Sontag

moved population matter

Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy

Susan Sontag

fascination reality thinking

How boring just to be a body.

Susan Sontag

boring body

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Susan Sontag

eagerness vitality attention