Susan Sontag Quotes on Knowledge
Susan Sontag was a 20th and early 21st-century American writer, critic, and political activist, one of the most prominent public intellectuals of her generation. This page collects quotes attributed to Susan Sontag on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
Against Interpretation" (1964), p. 14 -
Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”
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Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“Reading is the quintessential passion.”
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“Review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil , The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963)”
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health , and yet only believes in the reality of sickness . The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr. -
“Review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil , The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963)”
The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. -
“The Benefactor (1963), Ch. 1, p. 1, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42012-9”
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is. -
“Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57”
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. -
“Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57”
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; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous c