List-Quotes

A Quote by Susan Sontag

Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are. — © Susan Sontag

Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

Quote Topics

Experiences Images Imagination Only Structures

Quote Author

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag
American - Author
January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004

An enormous amount of art and literature is erotic in the sense that it stimulates vague sexual emotions, but it has no pornographic intention or effect because "it leaves everything to the imagination." The consumer has to invent his own images, and it is felt, I do not know with what justification, that there is no harm in this.

Herbert Read

Herbert Read

Computer images, like camera images today, will be seen as representations of a simulated, second-degree reality with little or no connection to the unmediated world. This is one lesson we can learn from photographs, and especially from those of the last 25 years: images exist not to be believed, but to be interrogated.

Andy Grundberg

Andy Grundberg

Traditionally, images have functioned as representations of something in the world, but we are quickly approaching the point where vast majority of images are produced for other machines, and no human being will ever see them.

Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen

Most pornographic images are simply too repulsive.

Volkmar Sigusch

Volkmar Sigusch

Human artifacts not only include material structures and objects, such as buildings, machines, and automobiles, but they also include organizations, organizational structures like extended families . . . tribes, nations, corporations, churches, political parties, governments, and so on. Some of these may grow unconsciously, but they all originate and are sustained by the images in the human mind.

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth E. Boulding

A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first...A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts....Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images.

Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon

People learn who they are by the images of themselves, the representations that they seek.

Harry Lennix

Harry Lennix

Pornographic or erotic stories and pictures are worse than filthy or polluted food. The body has defenses to rid itself of unwholesome food. With a few fatal exceptions, bad food will only make you sick but do no permanent harm. In contrast, a person who feasts upon filthy stories or pornographic or erotic pictures and literature records them in this marvelous retrieval system we call a brain. The brain won't vomit back filth. Once recorded, it will always remain subject to recall, flashing its perverted images across your mind and drawing you away from the wholesome things in life.

Dallin H. Oaks

Dallin H. Oaks

Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.

Peggy Phelan

Peggy Phelan

The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge. It recognizes aesthetic, moral, and religious ideas and experiences as a species, in this case of mental structures or of images, which clearly interacts with other species in the world's great' ecosystem.

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth E. Boulding

I have always said that archival images are images without imagination. They petrify thought and kill any power of evocation.

Claude Lanzmann

Claude Lanzmann

I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representations, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations.

Jerry Fodor

Jerry Fodor

Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of geometry, theories of structures, or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture- literally a vision-in the minds of those who built them. Society is where it is today because people had the perception; the images and the imagination; the creativity that the Arts provide, to make the world the place we live in today.

Eugene S. Ferguson

Eugene S. Ferguson

When I do only images, people don't connect with the images because the images are too weird to understand. But when I explain the weird images with straight words, then all of a sudden there is a tension between the two that the audience wants to see.

Signe Baumane

Signe Baumane

A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances.

Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Korzybski

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