Susan Sontag

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.