Susan Sontag
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.Collection: Equality
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.Collection: Intelligence
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Death
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.Collection: Famous
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Fear
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.Collection: Society
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.Collection: Truth
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.Collection: Life
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.Collection: Dreams
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.Collection: Failure
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.Collection: Beauty
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Space
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.Collection: Travel
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
What we need is to use what we have.
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
Sanity is a cozy lie.
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
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.
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
It is not the position, but the disposition.
To photograph is to confer importance.
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.