Susan Sontag Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old Susan Sontag quotes, Susan Sontag sayings, and Susan Sontag proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.'

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune. Susan Sontag
The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man. Susan Sontag
Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures. Susan Sontag
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. Susan Sontag
The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs 'behind' the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. Susan Sontag
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable. Susan Sontag
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. Susan Sontag
My skull is crammed with quotations. Susan Sontag
Rules of taste enforce structures of power. Susan Sontag
Taste has no system and no proofs. Susan Sontag
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. Susan Sontag
There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. Susan Sontag
To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. Susan Sontag
The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Susan Sontag
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. Susan Sontag
There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. Susan Sontag
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility. Susan Sontag
False values begin with the worship of things. Susan Sontag
Depression is melancholy minus its charms, the animation, the fits. Susan Sontag
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. Susan Sontag
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 only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. Susan Sontag
Whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars. Susan Sontag
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. Susan Sontag
The aesthetic view of the world is extremely hospitable to many of the uncivilized ideas and dissociated yearnings. Susan Sontag
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
Sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication, through scruple, but then again it may not. Susan Sontag
False values begin with the worship of things. Susan Sontag
Style is the principle of decision in a work of art. Susan Sontag
Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is, 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. Susan Sontag
Now, it is cancer's turn to be the disease that doesn't knock before it enters. Susan Sontag