Susan Sontag Quotes

I don't know why so many artists talk about the mainstream's problems from the fringe. I think, unfortunately, it's almost like our education makes us too safe and terrified to step into the world.

I do not like Moscow life. You live here not as you want to live, but as old women want you to.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

I know I've got a degree. Why does that mean I have to spend my life with intellectuals? I've got a lifesaving certificate but I don't spend my evenings diving for a rubber brick with my pyjamas on.

I quit piano and violin because it felt too rigid. It was just my thing, something I fell in love with from a very early age.

Just because the only way you can maintain control over your bodily passions is to sit straight in your chair, knees together, hands delicately arranged in our lap, fingers tightly intertwined, does not mean that I am required to do the same.

The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age.

An individual who stands out, or disagrees or takes risks is a danger to such systems and is effortlessly and, unconsciously sidelined.

‎A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.

So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.

You cannot lay down a standard which all must follow.

All kids, I think, are creative, but they get it pounded out of them in school.

The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity.

One day old Thrashbarg said that Almighty Bob had declared that he, Thrashbarg, was to have first pick of the sandwiches. The villagers asked him when this had happened, exactly, and Thrashbarg said it had happened yesterday, when they weren't looking. 'Have faith,' Old Thrashbarg said, 'or burn!' They let him have first pick of the sandwiches. It seemed easiest.

Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values.

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.

The Hollywood I know has allowed me the opportunity after opportunity to keep doing new things and not send me out to pasture. I don't want to go to pasture. It's cold. I'm allergic to grass. And the cows are mean.

Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.

I'm afraid when too many people know too much about you, it actually makes us all a lot more boring because you're afraid to express yourself.

Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky's and our Camelot.

What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.

That old bald cheater, Time.