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
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. – Susan Sontag
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
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style — but a particular kind of style. It is love of the exaggerated. – Susan Sontag
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
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them. – Susan Sontag
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isnt sex but death. – Susan Sontag
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. – Susan Sontag
Depression is melancholy minus its charms — the animation, the fits. – Susan Sontag
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
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
To take a photograph is to participate in another persons mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to times relentless melt. – Susan Sontag
Most people in this society who arent actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. – Susan Sontag
A familys photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it. – Susan Sontag
Volume depends precisely on the writers having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone. – Susan Sontag
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. – Susan Sontag
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. – Susan Sontag
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. – Susan Sontag
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. – Susan Sontag
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. – Susan Sontag
