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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.

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
Makes
Fools
Formulating
Keep
Opinions
Discredited
Political
Fool
Scorned
Certain
Danger
Professionals
Might
Leave
Intellectuals
Kind
Opinion
Idealism
Way
Politics
Informed
Making
Retreat

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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We are ruled by quotations.
Susan Sontag
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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.
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In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: Oh, this is where it comes from! I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.
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art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
Susan Sontag
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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
Susan Sontag
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It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.
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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.
Susan Sontag
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The white race is the cancer of human history it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Susan Sontag
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
Susan Sontag
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I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
Susan Sontag
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Courage is morally neutral.
Susan Sontag
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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
Susan Sontag
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
Susan Sontag
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Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
Susan Sontag
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
Susan Sontag
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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
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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
Susan Sontag