Susan Sontag idézet

oldal 6

„Korunk aggodalmainak java része, hogy a valódi világot a képek világa pótolja.”

„Miközben a fénykép hitele mindig is a témához fűződő viszonyától függ (hiszen valaminek a fényképe), a fényképezés művészet voltát alátámasztó érvek kénytelenek a látás szubjektivitását hangsúlyozni. A fénykép mindenfajta esztétikai értékelése – valahol a mélyben – kétértelmű; ez a magyarázata a fotós ízlés megrögzött védekezésének és végletes változékonyságának.
A fényképezésről, Európa Könyvkiadó, 1981”

„Hazudni: az önvédelem egyik formája.”

„A modern művészetben inkább a művész, mint egy szent válik példamutató mártírrá.”

„Gyászoljunk közösen, de ne hülyüljünk el mindahányan. – (szeptember 11-ről)”

„A fotós mindig olyat fotóz, ami eltűnőben van és ezzel gyakran sietteti is eltűnését.”

„Az egyedüli érdekes válaszok azok, amelyek szétrombolják a kérdést.”

„Amerika egyik legmeghatározóbb írója, filozófusa. Tizenhét könyve és számos esszéje mellett tanított filozófiát és szerkesztett kritikai folyóiratot New Yorkban, forgatott saját forgatókönyv alapján filmet Svédországban és Izraelben. Elsősorban a tömegkultúra jelentőségéről írott – gyakran provokatív – esszéiről ismerték. Egész életében küzdött az emberi jogokért.”

“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.”

“"Old" and "new" are the perennial poles of all feeling and sense of orientation in the world. We cannot do without the old, because in what is old is invested all our past, our wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our sense of realism. We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism, our blind biological yearning, our ability to forget — the healing ability that makes reconciliation possible.”

“The United States is a generically religious society. That is, in the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.”

“The Bush administration has committed the country to a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war — for "the war on terror" is nothing less than that.”

“To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings."”

“As Cioran correctly points out, a principal danger of being overcivilized is that one all to easily relapses, out of sheer exhaustion and the unsatisfied need to be “stimulated,” into a vulgar and passive barbarism. Thus, “the man who unmasks his fictions” through an indiscriminate pursuit of the lucidity that is promoted by modern liberal culture “renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depth.” There, he concludes, “no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.””

“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.”

“Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe that let Bosnia die.
A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don't take place. Wars, genocides — that happened here once, but no longer. It's something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not "really" Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all.”

“And isn't it usually so, that lovers who share their daily lives with each other gradually find they need to put very little into words?”

“It depends on me, whether I'm happy within myself.”

“According to an old rule of psychic contagion: that absence of clarity or outright confusion in one, just one specific, local matter will end by infecting the whole of one's judgment.”

“To love one's work is a way of loving oneself, and leaves one freer to love other people.
But beware the difference between loving one's work and being merely engrossed in it.”

“Don't be too hard on the envious. Be glad you have, or had in the past, something enviable.”

“Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. That illness can be not an epic of suffering but the occasion of some kind of self-transcendence is affirmed by sentimental literature and, more convincingly, by case histories offered by doctor-writers. Some illnesses seem more apt than others for this kind of meditation.”

“Shall I tell you about getting older? When you get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don't fancy me. I want a young man. I love beauty. So what's new?”

“If America is the culmination of Western white civilisation, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilisation.”

“I don't feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my lonliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall, like seeking love in a whorehouse.”