“The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”

—  Susan Sontag

Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the…" by Susan Sontag?
Susan Sontag photo
Susan Sontag 168
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist 1933–2004

Related quotes

Harper Lee photo
Ben Klassen photo
Borís Pasternak photo
James Anthony Froude photo

“Yes, genius alone is the Redeemer; it bears our sorrows, it is crowned with thorns for us; the children of genius are the church militant, the army of the human race.”

Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Say not they have their reward on earth in the calm satisfaction of noble desires, nobly gratified, in the sense of great works greatly done; that too may be, but neither do they ask for that. They alone never remember themselves; they know no end but to do the will which beats in their hearts' deep pulses. Ay, but for these, these few martyred heroes, it might be after all that the earth was but a huge loss-and-profit ledger book; or a toy machine some great angel had invented for the amusement of his nursery; and the storm and the sunshine but the tears and the smiles of laughter in which he and his baby cherubs dressed their faces over the grave and solemn airs of slow-paced respectability.
Yes, genius alone is the Redeemer; it bears our sorrows, it is crowned with thorns for us; the children of genius are the church militant, the army of the human race. Genius is the life, the law of mankind, itself perishing, that others may take possession and enjoy. Religion, freedom, science, law, the arts, mechanical or heautiful, all which gives respectability a chance, have heen moulded out by the toil and the sweat and the blood of the faithful; who, knowing no enjoyment, were content to he the servants of their own born slaves, and wrought out the happiness of the world which despised and disowned them.

Benjamin Disraeli photo

“Gentl, I am a party man. I believe that, without party, Parliamentary government is impossible. I look upon Parliamentary government as the noblest government in the world, and certainly the one most suited to England.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Speech to the Conservatives of Manchester (3 April 1872), cited in The World's Best Orations from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, Vol. 1 (eds. David Josiah Brewer, Edward Archibald Allen, William Schuyler), pp. 309-338

Rod Serling photo
Ben Klassen photo
Virginia Woolf photo
Virginia Woolf photo

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

Ch. 3, p. 72) http://books.google.com/books?id=CoP1GxjoNnsC&q="The+history+of+men's+opposition+to+women's+emancipation+is+more+interesting+perhaps+than+the+story+of+that+emancipation+itself"&pg=PA72#v=onepage
Source: A Room of One's Own (1929)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton photo

Related topics