Quote

The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

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
Party
Soviet
Applauded
American
Mature
Unanimity
Reality
Officials
Contemptible
Seems
Seemed
Concealing
Wells
Congress
Commentators
Well
Media
Unworthy
Congratulatory
Self
Democracy
Rhetoric
Unanimously
Days
Recent
Sanctimonious

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
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
Image
Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
Susan Sontag
Image
Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
Susan Sontag
Image
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
Image
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
Susan Sontag
Image
The really important thing is not to reject anything.
Susan Sontag
Image
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
Susan Sontag
Image
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
Susan Sontag
Image
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
Susan Sontag
Image
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
Susan Sontag
Image
She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
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
Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
Susan Sontag
Image
One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
Susan Sontag
Image
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
Image
Art is seduction, not rape.
Susan Sontag
Image
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
Susan Sontag
Image
I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
Susan Sontag
Image
In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
Susan Sontag
Image
Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
Susan Sontag