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

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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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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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You can always be quoted.
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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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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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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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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
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Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is sexier than communism.
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