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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.

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
Hard
Graduation
Afraid
Less

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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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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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.
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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
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I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.
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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.
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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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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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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.
Susan Sontag
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The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
Susan Sontag
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Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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
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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
Susan Sontag
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Desire has no history.
Susan Sontag
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To photograph is to confer importance.
Susan Sontag