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"I don't care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces 'intelligence."
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Exlpore more Psychology quotes
"Shame lies. All the time. About everything. Don't believe your shame."
"Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other."
"[If a man] postpone[s] any open acknowledgement... that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends [are] based... he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent. He will assume, at first only by his manner, but presently by his words, all sorts of cynical and sceptical attitudes which are not really his. But... they may become his. All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be."
"We are what we believe we are."
"Man is more likely to believe an opinion that he wanted to hear - than a fact that he wishes was an opinion."
"Narcissists often feign oppression because narcissists always feel entitled."
"Some people are each envious of the person they used to be."
"No single bad person regards themselves as a bad person."
"You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it."
"To say 'I want to have sex with this person' is to express a desire which is not intellectually directed in the way that 'I want to eradicate poverty in the world' is an intellectually directed desire. Furthernore, the gratification of sexual desire can only ever give temporary satisfaction. Thus as Nagarjuna, the great Indian scholar said: 'When you have an itch, you scratch. But not to itch at all is better than any amount of scratching."
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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