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

Susan Sontag

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Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Criticism
Lapses
Entire
Indicate
Judgment
Judgments
Failure
Critic
Courses
Sensibility
Course
Entitled
Wrong
Radical
Certain
Critics

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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
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I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
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Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
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