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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.

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
Something
Taboos
Taboo
Ugly
Calling
Anything

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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
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Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.
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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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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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A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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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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The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.
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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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How boring just to be a body.
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To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
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Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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