Susan Sontag Quotes About Virtue

Quotes about: Virtue

• It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Twilight

• Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary.

  Susan Sontag

  Names, Justice, Acting

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.184, Macmillan

• Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.

  Susan Sontag

  School, Assessment, Judging

  Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.135, Macmillan

• Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Twilight

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.16, Macmillan

• A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue - my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of the good an idol - is open to the charge of being still caught within the dialectic of idolatry. I've made a moral criticism of my moral consciousness. Meta-idolatry.

  Susan Sontag

  Discovery, Idols, Lust

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.330, Macmillan

• I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.

  Susan Sontag

  Believe, People, Brave

  "The 'Traitor' Fires Back". Interview with David Talbot, www.salon.com. October 17, 2001.

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