1-Love-Quotes.com
Top 100 Love Quotes

Susan Sontag Quotes

Found 99 quotes by Susan Sontag .
[ Page 1 of 5 ]
.
"Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals."
Susan Sontag
Arts And Artists
Add Category or Author
.
"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."
Susan Sontag
Fantasy
Add Category or Author
.
"Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic."
Susan Sontag
Nature
Add Category or Author
.
"Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives."
Susan Sontag
Sexuality
Add Category or Author
.
"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
Aphorisms And Epigrams
Add Category or Author
.
"American ''energy'' is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into the loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into self-punishing neuroses. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question."
Susan Sontag
America
Add Category or Author
.
"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''"
Susan Sontag
Literary Criticism
Add Category or Author
.
"Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene -- in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses."
Susan Sontag
Cancer
Add Category or Author
.
"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
Ecology
Add Category or Author
.
"Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies."
Susan Sontag
Political Correctness
Add Category or Author
.
"Perversity is the muse of modern literature."
Susan Sontag
Literature
Add Category or Author
.
"The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster."
Susan Sontag
Pessimism
Add Category or Author
.
"Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it."
Susan Sontag
Image
Add Category or Author
.
"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."
Susan Sontag
Psychology
Add Category or Author
.
"In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable."
Susan Sontag
Critics And Criticism
Add Category or Author
.
"Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life -- its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness -- conjoin to dull our sensory faculties."
Susan Sontag
Excess
Add Category or Author
.
"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."
Susan Sontag
Memory
Add Category or Author
.
"The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us."
Susan Sontag
America
Add Category or Author
.
"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
Minorities
Add Category or Author
.
"With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses."
Susan Sontag
Disease
Add Category or Author
.
"What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being and one's existence as a sexual being -- while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up. Normally we don't experience, at least don't want to experience, our sexual fulfillment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulfillment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not."
Susan Sontag
Pornography
Add Category or Author

Recommended

Wedding Quotes
Wedding Toasts
Wedding Toasts
Irish Wedding Toasts

Add this widget to your website!
You Might Like This Author

Leo Buscaglia 1924-03-31

Leo Buscaglia
"Love yourself, accept yourself, forgive yourself, and be good to yourself, because without you the rest of us are without a source of many wonderful things."

Leo Buscaglia Quotes

Popular Authors & Topics

  • Marilyn Monroe
  • Bob Marley
  • Shakespeare
  • Audrey Hepburn
  • Mother Teresa
  • Dr Seuss
  • Albert Einstein
  • Emily Bronte
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  • Oscar Wilde
  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Famous Love Quotes
  • Funny Quotes
  • Inspirational
  • Quotes about Life
  • Love Poems
  • Birthday Quotes
  • Family Quotes
  • Cute Quotes
  • Motivational Quotes
  • Happiness Quotes
  • Life Quotes

    • Topics Alphabetically

    A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

    Authors by Last Name

    A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

    About 1-Love-Quotes.com

    1-Love-Quotes.com is dedicated to provide you with more Love Quotes, and now, starting soon, more Love Poems than any site on the entire World Wide Web.

    "Words of love to be remembered."

    Copyright © 2002-2013 1-Love-Quotes.com

    Like us on Facebook for a love quote every day!
    X