Susan Sontag Quotes

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking.

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism.

But if we consider what emotions would be desirable [in response to the suffering of others], it seems too simple to elect sympathy.

And it is not necessarily better to be moved. Sentimentality, notoriously, is entirely compatible with a taste for brutality and worse.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated.

Wherever people feel safe...they will be indifferent.

The question is, Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, Whom do we believe we have the right to blame?

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. (They look like everybody else).

Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand.

The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs.

Nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.

Often their [media] decisions are cast as judgments about “good taste”—always a repressive standard when invoked by institutions.

Most people will not question the rationalizations offered by their government for starting or continuing a war.

War is the largest crime.