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"Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more."
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"Because that's the thing about mean people: They make you think that the world will never work, that there are divides that you will fall into if you approach. It takes a whole lot of good people to fill in the breach created by a single mean one."

"Being tough isn't in and of itself a bad thing. Looking back on it, though, I can see I was too used to being strong, and never tried to understand those who were weak. I was too used to being fortunate, and didn't try to understand those less fortunate. Too used to being healthy, and didn't try to understand the pain of those who weren't. Whenever I saw a person in trouble, somebody paralyzed by events, I decided it was entirely his fault""he just wasn't trying hard enough. People who complained were just plain lazy. My outlook on life was unshakable, and practical, but lacked any human warmth. And not a single person around me pointed this out.' - Miu."

"I had rather that the human race, having a certain quality in their lives, should continue for only a few centuries than that, losing freedom, friendship, dignity, and mercy, and learning to be quite content without them, they should continue for millions of millennia."

"Every human being on earth is the same and our very being is crying out for same need."

"You couldn't predict what was going to happen for one simple reason: people."

"Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul be just another human soul."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag


"Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt."


"Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone."


"It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin."


"Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims."


"Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one."


"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."


"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."


"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."
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