Susan Sontag Quotes

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.

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

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.

Al l forms of consensus about "great" books and "perennial" problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of "what is already known." Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

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.

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe -- though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence. It is felt to be obscene -- in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration . . . because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings.

American "energy" is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into the loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts.nd into self-punishing neuroses. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question.