Quotes by Susan Sontag

About Susan Sontag:

Susan Sontag was an American writer and filmmaker, teacher and political activist, publishing her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Susan Sontag

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obli...

Susan Sontag

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The dise...

Susan Sontag

One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the nee...

Susan Sontag

The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people...

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer , when we see these images. Nei...

Susan Sontag

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- ...

Susan Sontag

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

Susan Sontag

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.

Susan Sontag

There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Susan Sontag

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Susan Sontag

To the militant, identity is everything.

Susan Sontag

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

Susan Sontag

All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.

Susan Sontag

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

Susan Sontag

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Susan Sontag

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

Susan Sontag

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started ...

Susan Sontag

Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

Susan Sontag

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,...

Susan Sontag

Author Bio

  • NameSusan Sontag
  • DescriptionAmerican writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist
  • BornJanuary 16, 1933
  • DiedDecember 28, 2004
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Film Director; Screenwriter; Professor; Essayist; Novelist
  • WorksOn Photography; Against Interpretation; Illness As Metaphor; AIDS And Its Metaphors; Under The Sign Of Saturn
  • AwardsJerusalem Prize; Prince Of Asturia Literary Prize; Peace Prize Of The German Book Trade; National Book Award; George Polk Award