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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.

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
Inevitable
Weather
Affair
State
War
States
Elective
Affairs

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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
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The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.
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That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.
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Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
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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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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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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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Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world
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Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
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Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
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How boring just to be a body.
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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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The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
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taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
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