“It is passivity that dulls feeling.”
Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
Quotes from workRegarding the Pain of Others
Regarding the Pain of Others is a 2003 book-length essay by Susan Sontag, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was her last published book before her death in 2004. It is regarded by many to be a follow-up or addendum to On Photography, despite the fact that the two essay collections convey Sontag's radically different opinions about photography. The essay is especially interested in war photography. Using photography as evidence for her opinions, Sontag sets out to answer one of the three questions posed in Virginia Woolf's book Three Guineas, "How in your opinion are we to prevent war?"
“To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”
Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.”
Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“Wherever people feel safe (…) they will be indifferent.”
Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”
Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), p. 101,
Context: Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.
