Susan Sontag Quotes and Sayings
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“Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.”
-- Susan Sontag -
“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.”
-- Susan Sontag -
“What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”
-- Susan Sontag -
“Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.”
-- Susan Sontag -
“Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”
-- Susan Sontag -
“Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.”
-- Susan Sontag -
“Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.”
-- Susan Sontag -
“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.”
-- Susan Sontag