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Quotes from Regarding the Pain of Others — Susan Sontag

1933–2004 United States

← All quotes by Susan Sontag

26 quotes

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.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Often their [media] decisions are cast as judgments about “good taste”—always a repressive standard when invoked by institutions.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

War is a man’s game—the killing machine has a gender, and it is male.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

To the militant, identity is everything.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Space reserved for being serious is hard to come by in a modern society, whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

But if we consider what emotions would be desirable [in response to the suffering of others], it seems too simple to elect sympathy.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

They [photographs of war victims] create the illusion of consensus.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Ever since [the Vietnam War], battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Most people will not question the rationalizations offered by their government for starting or continuing a war.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

In contrast, images offering evidence that contradicts cherished pieties are invariably dismissed as having been staged for the camera.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Wherever people feel safe...they will be indifferent.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

And it is not necessarily better to be moved. Sentimentality, notoriously, is entirely compatible with a taste for brutality and worse.

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Susan Sontag (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.