Quotes by Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Explore a curated collection of 27 quotes by Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others. Discover timeless wisdom, insightful thoughts, and memorable words that have inspired readers around the world. Browse through the gallery below and click on any quote to read more.

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a rememberi — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain. — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's. — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, li — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no ri — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value i — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, s — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think ab — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical e — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures fr — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, thro — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local. — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize. — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more. — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others