Quote

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

Susan Sontag

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Matter
Remaining
Merciful
Cruel
Direction
Population
Moved
Percent
Either

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
Susan Sontag
Image
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
Image
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
Susan Sontag
Image
It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
Susan Sontag
Image
When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.
Susan Sontag
Image
War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
Susan Sontag
Image
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
Susan Sontag
Image
Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
Susan Sontag
Image
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
Susan Sontag
Image
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Susan Sontag
Image
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
Susan Sontag
Image
Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
Image
Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger danger is only a means to success.
Susan Sontag
Image
When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
Susan Sontag
Image
A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
Susan Sontag
Image
I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
Susan Sontag
Image
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Susan Sontag
Image
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
Susan Sontag
Image
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
Susan Sontag
Image
Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
Susan Sontag