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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
#Successful #Self #Feelings
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“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
#Beauty #Citizens #Redemption
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“What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Beauty #Beautiful #Women
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“Sanity is a cozy lie.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Depression #Women #Lying
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“Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Exercise #Literature #Ability
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“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
#Cancer #Government #Civilization
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“Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.”
-- Susan Sontag
#New Year #Kindness #Prayer
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“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
#Dream #Memories #Book
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“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Love #Mysterious #Relation
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“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Art #Real #Design
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“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Inspirational #Inspiring #Kissing
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“It is not the position, but the disposition.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Inspirational #Motivational #Attitude
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“I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Self #People #Transformation
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“To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Artist #Hands #Eras
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“To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Moments #Photograph #Mortality
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“The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Interesting #History #Answers
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“Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Art #Passion #Perfect
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“The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Creativity #Men #Boredom
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“One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Feelings
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“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Strong #Feelings #Creation
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“Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Book #Reading #Bigs
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“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Intelligent #People #Care
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“Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Patient #Exploring #Conscience
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“Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Healthy #Becoming #Alive
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“To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Thinking #Sage #Paraphrase
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“Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art”
-- Susan Sontag
#Art #Worry #People
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“Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Nature #Gun #People
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“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Art #Science #Fiction
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“I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Envy #People #Attention
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“Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.”
-- Susan Sontag
#Work #Ambition #Doe
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