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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

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

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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
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Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
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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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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
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To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
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Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
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Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
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Art is seduction, not rape.
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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