Susan Sontag

“My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.”

“Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.”

“Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.”

“My library is an archive of longings.”

“Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.”

“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.”

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

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

“Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.”

“I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship -- love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can be tender and involve a desire to hug or whatever. But it certainly doesn't mean you want to take off your clothes with that person. But certain friendships can be erotic. Oh, I think friendship is very erotic, but it isn't necessarily sexual. I think all my relationships are erotic: I can't imagine being fond of somebody I don't want to touch or hug, so therefore there's always an erotic aspect to some extent.”

“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the w”

“Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

“All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.”

“In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.”

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

“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.”

“Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives -- envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibted, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do ... They caution[ed] themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn't let ourselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the ... jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it -- then you know. The south has got you.”

“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.”

“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.”

“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.”