Quote

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

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
Large
Populations
Awareness
Catastrophe
Taken
Privileged
Part
Represent
Seems
Aids
Feel
Model
Catastrophes
Feels
Population
Await
Models
Occupies

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
Susan Sontag
Image
Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
Susan Sontag
Image
The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
Susan Sontag
Image
To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
Susan Sontag
Image
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
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
Courage is morally neutral.
Susan Sontag
Image
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
Susan Sontag
Image
Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
Susan Sontag
Image
The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
Susan Sontag
Image
Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
Susan Sontag
Image
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
Susan Sontag
Image
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
Susan Sontag
Image
To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
Susan Sontag
Image
Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
Susan Sontag
Image
Ideas disturb the levelness of life
Susan Sontag
Image
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
Susan Sontag
Image
... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
Susan Sontag
Image
Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
Susan Sontag
Image
Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
Susan Sontag