The United States is a generically religious society. That is,…

The United States is a generically religious society. That is, in the United States it’s not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

Sourced, Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)

Other Susan Sontag Quotes

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…
We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying. - View Quote Details on We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied…
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…
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…
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…
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended…. Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises. - View Quote Details on Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument…
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. - View Quote Details on In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of…
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! - View Quote Details on Americans have it right. Europeans are not in an evangelical…
Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves as the victims. (Clinton equals Hitler, etc.) But it is grotesque to equate the casualties inflicted by the NATO bombing with the mayhem inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people in the last eight years by the Serb programs of ethnic cleansing.
Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust.
No forceful response to the violence of a state against peoples who are nominally its own citizens? (Which is what most “wars” are today. Not wars between states.) The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this? - View Quote Details on Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves as the victims…
Stop the War and Stop the Genocide, read the banners being waved in the demonstrations in Rome and here in Bari. For Peace. Against War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without making war? - View Quote Details on Stop the War and Stop the Genocide, read the banners…