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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.

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
Artist
Artificial
Social
Touched
Art
Creates
Place
Condition
Conditions
Start
Force
Comment
Making
Reflect

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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
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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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The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
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Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
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Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
Susan Sontag
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
Susan Sontag
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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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Paintings invariably sum up photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
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All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
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One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
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taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
Susan Sontag
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Susan Sontag
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You can always be quoted.
Susan Sontag
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Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.
Susan Sontag
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
Susan Sontag
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the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
Susan Sontag
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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
Susan Sontag
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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