Americans have it right. Europeans are not in an evangelical…

Americans have it right. Europeans are not in an evangelical — or a bellicose — mood.
Indeed, sometimes I have to pinch myself to be sure I am not dreaming: that what many people in my own country now hold against Germany, which wreaked such horrors on the world for nearly a century — the new “German problem,” as it were — is that Germans are repelled by war; that much of German public opinion is now virtually… pacifist!

Sourced, Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)

Other Susan Sontag Quotes

Evans wanted his photographs to be “literate, authoritative, transcendent.” The moral universe of the 1930s being no longer ours, these adjectives are barely creditable today. Nobody demands that photography be literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative. Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent. - View Quote Details on Evans wanted his photographs to be “literate, authoritative, transcendent.” The…
An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured on digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. - View Quote Details on An erotic life is, for more and more people, that…
The writer in me distrusts the good citizen, the “intellectual ambassador,” the human rights activist — those roles which are mentioned in the citation for this prize, much as I am committed to them. The writer is more skeptical, more self-doubting, than the person who tries to do (and to support) the right thing. - View Quote Details on The writer in me distrusts the good citizen, the “intellectual…
Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist upon their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up — a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing — that “it seemed like a movie.” This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was. While many people in non-industrialized countries still feel apprehensive when being photographed, divining it to be some kind of trespass, an act of disrespect, a sublimated looting of the personality or the culture, people in industrialized countries seek to have their photographs taken — feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs. - View Quote Details on Reality has come to seem more and more like what…
The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. - View Quote Details on The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the…
The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. - View Quote Details on The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress…
As a secular person, and as a woman, I’ve always been appalled by the Taliban regime and would dearly like to see them toppled. I was a public critic of the regime long before the war started. But I’ve been told that the Northern Alliance is absolutely no better when it comes to the issue of women. The crimes against women in Afghanistan are just unthinkable; there’s never been anything like it in the history of the world. So of course I would love to see that government overthrown and something less appalling put in its place.
Do I think bombing is the way to do it? Of course I don’t. It’s not for me to speculate on this, but there are all sorts of realpolitik outcomes that one can imagine. - View Quote Details on As a secular person, and as a woman, I’ve always…
I’m sickened by the way that the delivery of so-called humanitarian aid is once again being used as a justification — or cover — for war. - View Quote Details on I’m sickened by the way that the delivery of so-called…
Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy. - View Quote Details on Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude,…
So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. - View Quote Details on So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the…