“ 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, the surgeons at the military hospital where the phot… Susan Sontag
“ Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. Susan Sontag
“ I am sometimes asked about the concept or definition of a 'public intellectual,' and though I find the whole idea faintly silly, I believe it should ideally mean that the person so identified is self-… Christopher Hitchens
“ Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by… Susan Sontag
“ Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more. Susan Sontag
“ Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize. Susan Sontag
“ In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain. Susan Sontag
“ 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, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised… Susan Sontag
“ With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence. Susan Sontag
“ 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 them, about the capacity actually to assimilate wha… Susan Sontag
“ 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 view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibi… Susan Sontag
“ Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. Susan Sontag
“ To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance. Susan Sontag
“ 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 suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw powe… Susan Sontag
“ 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, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be… Susan Sontag
“ 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 what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful,… Susan Sontag
“ No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain. Susan Sontag
“ Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. Susan Sontag
