Susan Sontag Quotes

Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good.

Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.

The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress.

Human it is to have compassion on the unhappy.

We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.

She knows as well as anyone that pity, having played, soon tires.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

Becoming chronically ill has definitely given me a greater understanding of human nature, and I've learned to accept people's lack of long-term compassion for others while they live their busy lives.

If you feel more emotion looking at a picture of queuing lorries than a picture of desperate humans living in a lay-by, you need to check your bedtime routine for someone beating you round the head with a meat tenderiser.

Honestly, the pains of humanity have been draining me.

Pierre was an extraordinary teacher - he really was one of the best, and he raised the boys so, so well: to have a global view, to have compassion, to be humanitarians, to really be concerned about alleviating suffering.

Most people have the ability to turn their empathy engine back on, but there's such a seductive burn to not being empathetic.

Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

Seeing other people in pain causes me pain.

My students tell me, we don't want to love! We're tired of being loving! And I say to them, if you're tired of being loving, then you haven't really been loving, because when you are loving you have more strength.

Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people's pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else's responsibility and not our own.

Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him-the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel.

It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering

At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary.

One does not really feel much grief at other people's sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face, thinking oneself brutal for not caring more; but one cannot and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people's tears, life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour's.

There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

I find it difficult to feel responsible for the suffering of others. That's why I find war so hard to bear. It's the same with animals: I feel the less harm I do, the lighter my heart. I love a light heart. And when I know I'm causing suffering, I feel the heaviness of it. It's a physical pain. So it's self-interest that I don't want to cause harm.

I couldn't stop bawling, watching the towers come down. it was a terrible thing to happen. And a terrible thing to realize that I don't sit though the nigh crying when such horrors happen all the time.

A stray dog, I might understand," she said. "But this? You are too softhearted." No, Mabry," Ravus said. "I am not." He looked in Val's direction. "I think she wants to die." Maybe you can help her after all," Mabry said. "You're good at helping people die.