Regarding the Pain of Others Quotes

“To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Wherever people feel safe (...) they will be indifferent.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent- if not inappropriate- response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may- in ways we might prefer not to imagine- be linked to their suffering, as the wealth as some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“It is passivity that dulls feeling.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration. ”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer enough, when we see these images. Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? All this, with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”
― 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

“As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. ”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“To the militant, identity is everything.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here. Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there, and from which the United States-a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history-is exempt. That this country, like every other country, has its tragic past does not sit well with the founding, and still all-powerful belief in American exceptionalism.”
― 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

“War has been the norm and peace the exception”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us—grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. *   *   * P”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.”
― 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

“It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.”
― 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 man? (Probably yes.)”
― 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 in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.”
― 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, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.”
― 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

“What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.”
― 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 Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others