A Quote by Susan Sontag

There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. — © Susan Sontag
There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
I've received more and more emails from teachers saying that they are beginning to teach presence in their classroom without necessarily calling it that or calling it anything, not as part of the official curriculum. It's like an underground movement not yet officially recognized by the educational authorities - at least not as far as I know!
The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
Nothing is more debilitating than to care about something you can't do anything about. And you can't do anything about your adult children. You can want better for them, and maybe even begin to provide something for them, but in the long run, you cannot do anything about someone else's vibration other than hold them in the best light you can, mentally, and then project that to them. And sometimes, distance makes that much more possible than being up close to them.
The more ugly, older, more cantankerous, more ill and poorer I become, the more I try to make amends by making my colours more vibrant, more balanced and beaming.
There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.
I didn't invent satire. I didn't come up with it. And it will continue to be a very powerful tool to disrupt political taboos and social taboos and religious taboos, because those taboos are always used to control and to curb people's way of creativity and thinking, by making them feel guilty because they want to make a change.
Remember, taboos are just a map of what a society feels it's acceptable to be neurotic about. Taboos aren't rational.
More than anything in this world, I wish I had been born rich. It would have made up for everything. I'd still be ugly, sure, but I'd be rich and ugly. I'd still be weak and dim and tongue-tied with women, but I'd be rich enough for them not to care. I'd no longer be a social misfit, I'd be eccentric. And most of all, I'd no longer be what I was, I'd be something different.
Music is the only place that I can have no taboos. In real life I have a lot of taboos, and I can't talk about everything easily.
I guess, and it may be a flaw, that I think about rhythm more [than anything else]. I'm always wanting to find something unusual. I've started to try and write more traditionally, but for whatever reason, I tend toward trying to find something that sounds more like a pattern to me.
My mom and grandma always told me: if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. It's something everyone needs to be more conscious about. Putting more positive energy out into the world would be so beneficial.
The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.
Calling has this weight that somehow we think that your calling is fixed. That your calling is this line that you’ve finally found and now you're on that track and that’s what you’re gonna do forever and maybe that's the case. But I feel like calling has much more to to do with the moment that you’re in.
Whenever I see a taboo, I just think that's something we need to drag screaming out into the light and discuss. Because taboos are where our fears live, and taboos are the things that keep us tiny. Particularly for women.
I think just having everybody know who you are is more of a challenge. More than anything about it is just knowing people are watching. I know who I am, so it's watching things I say, what I do. Even if I'm in line at one of the rest stops or something, it's just being on my Ps and Qs at all times more than anything.
Life is all about finding yourself through experiences, and about learning more and more about who you are and what you’re capable of. If you’re getting older and not succeeding in anything or doing anything to make a positive impact on people, then you’re not living. You’re just waiting for death. Get out there and make an impact on people, whether it’s by helping them directly or by doing research to make their lives better or just by inspiring them. Do something good to be remembered for. This is more important than money.
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