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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

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
Defence
Lying
Simple
Form
Self

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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.
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Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
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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.
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The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
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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.
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writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
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The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
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A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world
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Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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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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