Susan Sontag Taste Quotations

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response.

Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.

The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

Taste has no system and no proofs.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

Passion paralyzes good taste.

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.