Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
Susan SontagRead
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights how diseases with unclear causes and ineffective treatments can take on excessive importance in public discourse.
Susan Sontag suggests that when a disease's origins are ambiguous and effective treatments are lacking, it becomes imbued with profound meaning and discussion. The uncertainty surrounding such diseases often leads to heightened focus and significance, reflecting societal fears and the human desire to seek understanding in the face of what is unknown.
Themes
DiseaseCausalitySignificanceUncertaintyTreatment
In practice
Example use cases
In a public health seminar discussing the impacts of misinformation on disease perception.
More from Susan Sontag
All quotes βScience fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan SontagRead
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Susan SontagRead
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Susan SontagRead
In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.
Susan SontagRead
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
Susan SontagRead
Similar quotes
What the scientists have always found by physical experiment was an a priori orderliness of nature, or Universe always operating at an elegance level that made the discovering scientist's working hypotheses seem crude by comparison. The discovered reality made the scientists exploratory work seem relatively disorderly.
R. Buckminster FullerRead
It was unthinkable not long ago that a biologist or paleontologist would be at the same conference as an astrophysicist. Now we have accumulated so much data in each of these branches of science as it relates to origins that we have learned that no one discipline can answer questions of origins alone.
Neil Degrasse TysonRead
The primitive fight-or-flight regions of our mammalian brains react to immediate danger. We instinctively run from an avalanche but the gradual retreat of a glacier, the portent of the far greater danger of rising temperatures and rising oceans, just doesn't get through to us in the same way.
David OlusogaRead
Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.
Charles DarwinRead
The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer.
Muhammad IqbalRead
We put water down into the earth to push up gas, then we say, 'Ooh, we're having a water crisis.' This is foolishness, and this kind of foolishness, where we try to excuse human behavior, is dangerous.
Mae JemisonRead