Susan Sontag Quotes

It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

We don't call art filth or filth art.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable.

... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.

Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time.

What was exciting in the Victorian Age, would leave a man of franker epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective.

Even personal tastes are learned, in the matrix of a culture or a subculture in which we grow up, by very much the same kind of process by which we learn our common values. Purely personal tastes, indeed, can only survive in a culture which tolerates them, that is, which has a common value that private tastes of certain kinds should be allowed.

There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.

The Bible was written between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago, and it's filled with the knowledge that people had in that period of time, some of which you and I rejected long ago. The Bible says that women are property, that homosexuals ought to be put to death, that anybody who worships a false God ought to be executed, that a child that talks back to his parents ought to be stoned at the gates of the city. Those ideas are absurd.

Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways - there's no division between the art object and what surrounds it.

I think there is limits to the assumption that wherever you are, the situation in a way tells you how to behave.

I feel worn down as a human being who has to constantly justify their existence to other human beings because I'm a minority

[Good taste] is a nineteenth-century concept. And good taste has never really been defined. The effort of projecting 'good taste' is so studied that it offends me. No, I prefer to negate that. We have to put a period to so-called good taste.

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

There is nothing so extreme that is not allowed by the custom of some nation or other.

Women do not transgress the bounds of decorum so often as men; but when they do, they go greater lengths.

Social taboos are shy like virtue; once lost, there is no remedy

Culture is public, because meaning is

Conventions are often more cruel than the law.

Slang in a woman's mouth is not obscene, it only sounds so.

A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.

We live in a very litigious society. I've never sued anybody. I certainly can imagine a situation where I might sue, but it seems more or less in bad taste.

Americans have an interesting conundrum, a black and white line: You're on one side or the other of Puritanism or licentiousness. But that gray area where people abide, between their ears or on the Internet, needs to be fleshed out more in terms of permission granted. I think a lot of women are contained within the parentheses of shoulds and role-play. It's all about entitlement and history. It's all about upper-body strength - and exacting your will.

What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.