Quote

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.

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
White
Racist
America
Racism
Country
Equality
Think
Committed
Thinking
Continue
Foreseeable
Race
Granting
American
Passionately
Future
Negro

More quotes by 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
The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
Susan Sontag
Image
Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
Susan Sontag
Image
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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
...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
Susan Sontag
Image
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.
Susan Sontag
Image
It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
Susan Sontag
Image
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
Image
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
Susan Sontag
Image
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.
Susan Sontag
Image
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
Susan Sontag
Image
Courage is morally neutral.
Susan Sontag
Image
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.
Susan Sontag
Image
I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
Susan Sontag
Image
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.
Susan Sontag
Image
The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
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
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Susan Sontag
Image
The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Susan Sontag