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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

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
Pleasure
Moral
Art
Performs
Wells
Gratification
Well
Consists
Service
Intelligent
Consciousness

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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.
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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.
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
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The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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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.
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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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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.
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The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
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Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger danger is only a means to success.
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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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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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.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
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