Susan Sontag quotes

" I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. " # Paranoia

" The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. " # Questions

" AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder. " # AIDS # Freedom # Power

" Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. " # Intelligence and Intellectuals # Taste # Ideas

" Sanity is a cozy lie. " # Bed

" Al forms of consensus about great books and perennial problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of what is already known. Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies. " # Political Correctness # Books - Reading # Heresy

" Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it. " # Image # Photography # Love

" We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. " # Fantasy # Fear # Life and Living

" American energy is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into the loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into self-punishing neuroses. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question. " # America # Freedom # Power

" 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. " # Travel and Tourism # Photography # Vacation