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I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.

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
Morality
Sin
Consciousness
Moral
Corrupted
Make
Idolatry
Good
Idol
Idols
Pursuit

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The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.
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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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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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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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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.
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
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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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I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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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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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.
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In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
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You can always be quoted.
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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
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To photograph is to confer importance.
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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
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Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.
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