Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.”

— Susan Sontag

152. “Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is “sexier” than communism.”

— Susan Sontag

153. “People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

155. “I write – and talk – in order to find out what I think.”

— Susan Sontag

156. “In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary – are, in the largest sense, political.”

— Susan Sontag

157. “Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It’s rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.”

— Susan Sontag

158. “War has been the norm and peace the exception.”

— Susan Sontag

159. “Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.”

— Susan Sontag

160. “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ’too much.”

— Susan Sontag

161. “War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.”

— Susan Sontag

162. “Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.”

— Susan Sontag

163. “Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon – one that’s as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy, an invisible technology.”

— Susan Sontag

164. “I know I’m not myself with people, but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.”

— Susan Sontag

165. “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.”

— Susan Sontag

166. “In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.”

— Susan Sontag

167. “As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.”

— Susan Sontag

168. “War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.”

— Susan Sontag

169. “Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.”

— Susan Sontag

170. “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.”

— Susan Sontag

171. “All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.”

— Susan Sontag

172. “Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.”

— Susan Sontag

173. “If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.”

— Susan Sontag

174. “Pornography is one of the branches of literature – science fiction is another – aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.”

— Susan Sontag

175. “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.”

— Susan Sontag

176. “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

177. “Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

— Susan Sontag

178. “The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.”

— Susan Sontag

179. “The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.”

— Susan Sontag

180. “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...”

— Susan Sontag

181. “The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.”

— Susan Sontag

182. “To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free – as opposed to rote – human response.”

— Susan Sontag

183. “All memory is individual, unreproducible – it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”

— Susan Sontag

184. “It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation – a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.”

— Susan Sontag

185. “Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology...”

— Susan Sontag

186. “Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.”

— Susan Sontag

187. “My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not ’language.”

— Susan Sontag

188. “Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help build a nascent one.”

— Susan Sontag

189. “Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.”

— Susan Sontag

190. “The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart.”

— Susan Sontag

191. “To the militant, identity is everything.”

— Susan Sontag

192. “I want to save my soul, that timid wind.”

— Susan Sontag

193. “When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

196. “I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing – not just a waiting.”

— Susan Sontag

197. “To photograph is to confer importance.”

— Susan Sontag

198. “The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.”

— Susan Sontag

199. “Unfortunately, moral beauty in art – like physical beauty in a person – is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag