Susan Sontag Quotes

The question is, will we continue to fight what may be a rearguard action to defend universal literacy as a central goal of our education system, or are we bold enough to see what's actually happening to our culture?

Dixie has just fallen to pieces. There are little patches of Dixie. But even in the heart of Dixie - in Alabama - Dixie is slipping. They've stopped using the word in commercial listings.

History ... is nothing else but the rise and disappearance of races.

I can say, particularly as a mother of four small children. I can talk about the coarsening of our culture.

Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality.

Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads.

In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.

Because Roman civilization perished through barbarian invasions, we are perhaps too much inclined to think that that is the only way a civilization can die. If the lights that guide us ever go out, they will fade little by little, as if of their own accord.... We therefore should not console ourselves by thinking that the barbarians are still a long way off. Some peoples may let the torch be snatched from their hands, but others stamp it out themselves.

I'm not very nostalgic, you see. I just don't think anybody has that kind of thing anymore. By culture, by breeding, by whatever, it's not there. The kids today-what the hell are they going to be? I like young people - yes, I do. But when I talk to people at the schools, and they say, "I saw you on the Twit," I don't even know what they are talking about.

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

We need to challenge the dominant culture: by ethics, principles and values.

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.

The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.

She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.

My dear, we live in an age of transition.

How did we go - in a relatively short amount of time - from Audrey Hepburn to Kim Kardashian? I don't know how that happened. Like did we all collectively slip and hit our heads as a society? Why are we accepting garbage as nourishment? I don't know what's going on.

It's really interesting because 50 years ago, if you didn't wear a hat everyone looked at you. It just proves that everything is fashion.

Why is it suddenly uncool to spell? That's all I want to know.

Spin-off technologies are changing the culture. Even if you don't become an engineer you could be a poet, a journalist, a lawyer, but you will be thinking innovation and your actions within society, who you vote for, what you value, all become a participant in an innovation economy.

Know your genre. Know your history. Read a book.

When any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words.

When politics is too slow, change has to come from culture.

Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more - absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.

The English literary movement at the end of the 18th century was obviously due in great part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of walking.