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"The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more."
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"We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche."
"The action or inaction of any government does not negate the Personal Responsibility of the citizens."
"The journey of every ignorant and obedient society always ends up in the same place: In the desert!"
"The only soap of a dirty society is the clean men, only the clean can wash the grimy!"
"What the new government of Nigeria and other African governments must do, is to start a massive reorientation campaign in the culture of the dignity of labour."
"To Have Thousands Transformed In The Society Is To Lack Unity."
"None of us commences life utterly alone. We each carry within our granular mass the protoplasm residue of past generations' ideas, customs, values, infatuations, prejudices, ethics, and mores. The lees wrought from our seedlings contribute to the social order that oversees a newborn's future. How we conduct ourselves in the here and now emulates our heritage, delineates the parameters of the present culture, and sets the embryonic stage for the emergent ethos of our future and for the generations of people whom we will never meet."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag
"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."
"Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing " which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power."
"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."
"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."
"To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune."
"Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed."
"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."
"Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be."
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