Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

22 quotes

Susan Sontag, an American writer, critic and public intellectual, is widely remembered for insights that continue to resonate with readers everywhere. With equal ease, Susan Sontag moved between History and Future, finding connections others missed. Browse 24 quotes by Susan Sontag that cover ground from History, Future, Women, Truth, and Travel. To get a sense of their style, try: "I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams."

“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.”

— Susan Sontag

History

All Quotes by Susan Sontag

“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.”

— Susan Sontag

History

“Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.”

— Susan Sontag

Fear

“The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”

— Susan Sontag

Truth

“To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.”

— Susan Sontag

Time

“I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.”

— Susan Sontag

Equality

“Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.”

— Susan Sontag

Society

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.”

— Susan Sontag

Art

“Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.”

— Susan Sontag

Future

“Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”

— Susan Sontag

Intelligence

“Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.”

— Susan Sontag

Failure

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

— Susan Sontag

Dreams

“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”

— Susan Sontag

History

“A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.”

— Susan Sontag

Family

“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”

— Susan Sontag

Science

“For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.”

— Susan Sontag

Death

“Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”

— Susan Sontag

Travel

“The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.”

— Susan Sontag

Beauty

“What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”

— Susan Sontag

Women

“Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.”

— Susan Sontag

Funny

“The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.”

— Susan Sontag

Famous