Susan Sontag Men Quotations

Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

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.

Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.

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

Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.

The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.

There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

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.

... liberal intellectualstend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping thatthose in positions of authority may prove to be enlightened men, wielding power justly, they are natural, if cautious, allies of the "establishment.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.

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

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.

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