45 Quotes About Susan-sontag

Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.