15 Best Susan Sontag Quotes And Sayings

“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.” – Susan Sontag

“What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.” – Susan Sontag

“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

“The only interesting ideas are heresies” – Susan Sontag

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

“All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.” – Susan Sontag

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

“We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.” – Susan Sontag

“An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured on digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component.” – Susan Sontag

“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.” – Susan Sontag

“One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.” – Susan Sontag

“Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.” – Susan Sontag

“One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.” – Susan Sontag

“The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.” – Susan Sontag

“Can I love someone.. And still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.” – Susan Sontag