Famous Quotes from ...

Susan Sontag

  • Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.... Susan Sontag {view}
  • I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams... Susan Sontag {view}
  • Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.... Susan Sontag {view}
  • Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been , what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal , needs to be protected from people.... Susan Sontag {view}
  • Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.... Susan Sontag {view}
  • It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.... Susan Sontag {view}
  • The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in the sense that moral principles contradict the way things really are --- and always will be. How things really are --- and always will be --- is neither all-evil nor all-good but deficient, inconsistent, inferior. Principles invite us to do something about the morass of contradictions in which we function morally. Principles invite us to clean up our act; to become intolerant of moral laxity and compromise and cowardice and the turning away from what is upsetting: that secret gnawing of the heart that tells us that what we are doing is not right, and so counsels us that we'd be better off just not thinking about it.... Susan Sontag {view}
  • What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine... Susan Sontag {view}
  • One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.... Susan Sontag {view}
  • Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.... Susan Sontag {view}