Susan Sontag's Quotes

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

What we need is to use what we have.

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

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

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.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

To him who is in fear everything rustles.

If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: 'Thou shalt not ration justice.'

Alas, how quickly the gratitude owed to the dead flows off, how quick to be proved a deceiver.

If it were possible to cure evils by lamentation and to raise the dead with tears, then gold would be a less valuable thing than weeping.

No treaty is ever an impediment to a cheat.

There is no success without hardship.

All a man's affairs become diseased when he wishes to cure evils by evils.

Look and you will find it - what is unsought will go undetected.

God's dice always have a lucky roll.

Time alone reveals the just man; but you might discern a bad man in a single day.

A day lays low and lifts up again all human things.

A word does not frighten the man who, in acting, feels no fear.

Don't you know that silence supports the accuser's charge?

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.

Quick decisions are unsafe decisions.

Things gained through unjust fraud are never secure.

A soul that is kind and intends justice discovers more than any sophist.

It is the merit of a general to impart good news, and to conceal the truth.

Now I see that going out into the testing ground of men it is the tongue and not the deed that wins the day.

Our happiness depends on wisdom all the way.

Whoever thinks his friend more important than his country, I rate him nowhere.

Isn't it the sweetest mockery to mock our enemies?

No lie ever reaches old age.

Silence is an ornament for women.

Do not grieve yourself too much for those you hate, nor yet forget them utterly.

Without labor nothing prospers.

If you have done terrible things, you must endure terrible things; for thus the sacred light of injustice shines bright.

It is the task of a good man to help those in misfortune.

Much wisdom often goes with fewest words.

Old age and the passage of time teach all things.

There is no greater evil than anarchy.

You should not consider a man's age but his acts.

A state is not a state if it belongs to one man.

Kindness is ever the begetter of kindness.

No speech can stain what is noble by nature.

A lie never lives to be old.

Best to live lightly, unthinkingly.

Better not to exist than live basely.

No one longs to live more than someone growing old.

But this is a true saying among men: the gifts of enemies are no gifts and profitless.