Susan Sontag quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

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.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

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.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

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

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.