Susan Sontag Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties

  Susan Sontag

  Loss, Culture, Modern Life

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

• The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.

  Susan Sontag

  Ethical Issues, Mass Culture, Minorities

• The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .

  Susan Sontag

  Hero, Culture, Ants

• But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.

  Susan Sontag

  Forgiving, Care, Culture

  Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

• Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

  Susan Sontag

  Lying, Reality, America

  Susan Sontag, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (2003). “Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung”

• Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Revenge, Sensual

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

• Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.

  Susan Sontag

  Mass Culture, Age, Matter

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

• Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

  Susan Sontag

  Two, Creative, Culture

  Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.177, Macmillan

• In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Revenge, Sensual

  Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.149, Macmillan

• We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.

  Susan Sontag

  Views, Intelligence, Culture

  Salmagundi, No. 31-32, (p. 29), 1975.

• War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.

  Susan Sontag

  War, Years, Long

  "Why Are We in Kosovo?" by Susan Sontag, www.nytimes.com. May 2, 1999.

• One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Tasks, Culture

  Susan Sontag, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (2003). “Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung”

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