"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
My library is an archive of longings.
More Susan Sontag quotes
"Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, th...
"One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at t...
"What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appea...
"With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.
"We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine...
"It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a vie...
"Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
"To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mer...
"Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, ac...
"It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the sufferin...
"Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, withou...
"No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
"Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
"It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.