Quote

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

Susan Sontag

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Compassion
Emotion
Action
Needs
Withers
Apathetic
Translated
Unstable

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
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.
Susan Sontag
Image
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
Susan Sontag
Image
What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
Susan Sontag
Image
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
Image
The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
Susan Sontag
Image
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
Susan Sontag
Image
Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
Susan Sontag
Image
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag
Image
Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
Susan Sontag
Image
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
Susan Sontag
Image
Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
Susan Sontag
Image
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.
Susan Sontag
Image
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.
Susan Sontag
Image
Ideas disturb the levelness of life
Susan Sontag
Image
The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
Susan Sontag
Image
Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
Susan Sontag
Image
Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
Susan Sontag
Image
whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
Susan Sontag
Image
The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
Susan Sontag
Image
Taste has no system and no proofs.
Susan Sontag