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"But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else."
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"Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it."
"A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times."
"The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart."
"An average woman is in this superior to an average man-that she never instigates, only responds."
"Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms."
"We don't see a lot of models for male social interaction. There's sports and barn raisings."
"People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other."
"I know not which lives more unnatural lives, obeying husbands, or commanding wives."
"Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics."
"The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag
"Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone."
"Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it."
"The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication."
"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."
"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."
"The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste."
"What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."
"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."
"It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones."
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