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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

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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
Population
Moved
Percent
Either
Matter
Remaining
Merciful
Cruel
Direction

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The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.
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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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This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
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When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.
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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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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
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Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
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If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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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.
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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
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I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
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The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
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Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
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I love to read the way people love to watch television.
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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