Quotes by Susan Sontag

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

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

The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

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

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

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.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.