Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 2

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

To the militant, identity is everything.

The only interesting ideas are heresies

Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)

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.

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.

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

Rüyaların yasaklanmamasına hayret ediyorum. Rüya ne büyük bir vaat! Ne büyük zevk! Ne kadar özel! Hem insana bir eş de gerekmez; kadın veya erkek, kimsenin işbirliğine gerek yok. Rüyalar, ruhun tamama ermemiş cinsel eylemidir.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams

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.

İnsan sonsuza dek kraliçe kalamaz. Gücünü devam ettirebilmek için ya tahttan vazgeçeceksin, yahut da şehit edileceksin. Ben birincisini seçtim.

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up - up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

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.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

With genius, as with beauty - all, well almost all, is forgiven.

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?"

[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

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.