I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well…

I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don’t consider it a moral virtue.

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Interview, “The ‘Traitor’ Fires Back” by David Talbot, Salon.com (2001-10-16 )

Other Susan Sontag Quotes

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…
From “old” Europe’s point of view, America seems bent on squandering the admiration — and gratitude — felt by most Europeans. The immense sympathy for the United States in the aftermath of the attack on September 11, 2001 was genuine. (I can testify to its resounding ardor and sincerity in Germany; I was in Berlin at the time.) But what has followed is an increasing estrangement on both sides. The citizens of the richest and most powerful nation in history have to know that America is loved, and envied… and resented. - View Quote Details on From “old” Europe’s point of view, America seems bent on…
All modern wars, even when their aims are the traditional ones, such as territorial aggrandizement or the acquisition of scarce resources, are cast as clashes of civilizations — culture wars — with each side claiming the high ground, and characterizing the other as barbaric. The enemy is invariably a threat to “our way of life,” an infidel, a desecrator, a polluter, a defiler of higher or better values. The current war against the very real threat posed by militant Islamic fundamentalism is a particularly clear example. - View Quote Details on All modern wars, even when their aims are the traditional…
What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art. - View Quote Details on What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is…
To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.
Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom. - View Quote Details on To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape…
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don’t become inured to what they are shown — if that’s the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. - View Quote Details on Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated…
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…
I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I feel. I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up. - View Quote Details on I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I…
One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling… which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. We have more or less the same bodies, but very different kinds of thoughts. I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking. - View Quote Details on One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between…
The Bush administration has committed the country to a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war — for “the war on terror” is nothing less than that. - View Quote Details on The Bush administration has committed the country to a new,…