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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

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
Moral
Devoted
Getting
Bear
Pain
Painful
Lowering
Art
Changes
Formerly
Used
Bears
Threshold
Much
Terrible
Morals
Hear
Shocking
Modern
Embarrassing

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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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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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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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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
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Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
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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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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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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.
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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
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I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
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