Susan Sontag

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1933 age 0

   Born

2. 1983 age 50

   CreditZelig

3. 2004 age 71

   Died

• GWGordon Willis1 title
• MJMichael Jeter1 title
• CCCharlie Chaplin1 title
• WAWoody Allen1 title
• PTPaula Trueman1 title
• RGRobert Greenhut1 title
• MBMel Bourne1 title
• AHAdolf Hitler1 title
• JRJohn Rothman1 title
• MFMia Farrow1 title

• Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

  Susan Sontag, CC BY-SA 4.0

• The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

  Susan Sontag, CC BY-SA 4.0

• 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.

  Susan Sontag, CC BY-SA 4.0

• If America is the culmination of Western white civilisation, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilisation.

  Susan Sontag, CC BY-SA 4.0

• The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.

  Susan Sontag, CC BY-SA 4.0

• We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.

  Susan Sontag, CC BY-SA 4.0