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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

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
Past
Intentions
Time
Photographs
Qualities
Intention
Photograph
Tend
Generalized
Particular
Pathos
Quality
Swallowed

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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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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 of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
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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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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
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I'm more cautious about what I write.
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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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Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
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10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
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The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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