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Tony Blair

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May, 1953) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 2, 1997 to June 27, 2007. He was an employment law barrister before being elected to Parliament as Labour Party MP for the constituency of Sedgefield in 1983. Becoming Labour Party leader in 1994, he adopted moderate pro-free market policies and won a landslide victory in the 1997 general election. His decision to send UK forces to assist in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was highly controversial and surrounding scandals tarnished his image, although he was re-elected in 2005.

1980s

 * I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly.
 * Hansard, House of Commons, 6th Series, vol. 45, col. 316.
 * Maiden speech as MP for Sedgefield (6 July 1983).

1993–April 1997

 * We should be tough on crime and tough on the underlying causes of crime.
 * "From the archive: Tony Blair is tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" New Statesman (29 January 1993, reprinted 7 January 2016)
 * Blair was then Shadow Home Secretary

 * I shall not rest until, once again, the destinies of our people and our party are joined together again in victory at the next general election Labour in its rightful place in government again.
 * Philip Webster, "Blair sets sights on Downing Street", The Times (22 July 1994).
 * Speech on being elected Leader of the Labour Party (21 July 1994).

 * The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.
 * The Mail on Sunday (2 October 1994).

 * Any parent wants the best for their children. I am not going to make a choice for my child on the basis of what is the politically correct thing to do.
 * "Mr Blair opts out", The Guardian (2 December 1994). Statement (1 December 1994) defending his decision to send his eldest son Euan to the London Oratory School which had opted out of local education authority control under a policy which the Labour Party opposed.

 * Tony Blair: Has the Prime Minister secured even the minimal guarantee from the Euro-rebels that, on a future vote of confidence on Europe, they will support him? John Major: I can sense the concern in the right hon. Gentleman's voice. Perhaps he would like to tell me whether he has received the support of the 50 MPs who defied his Front Bench over Maastricht; of the 40 who defied him over European finance; on a single currency, where the right hon. Member for Copeland (Dr. Cunningham) was in dispute with the deputy leader of the Labour party; and on clause IV, which half his, I think he called them, infantile MEPs want to keep. He does not, and his deputy leader does one day and does not the next. These are party matters. Will the right hon. Gentleman tell us what his position is? Tony Blair: There is one very big difference—I lead my party, he follows his.
 * Hansard, House of Commons 6th series, vol. 258, cols. 655-6.
 * Prime Minister's Question Time (25 April 1995).

 * We have no plans to increase tax at all.
 * Philip Bassett, "Blair pledges he will not raise tax", The Times, 21 September 1995, p. 1.
 * Response to questioning about Labour Party tax plans at a CBI seminar in Birmingham (20 September 1995).

 * I didn't come into politics to change the Labour Party. I came into politics to change the country.
 * Michael White, "Blair wants 'to make UK young again'", The Guardian (4 October 1995).
 * Speech to the Labour Party conference (3 October 1995).

 * I want to see a publicly-owned railway, publicly accountable.
 * Paul Routledge, "Why the unions aren't rocking Blair's boat", The Independent on Sunday (8 October 1995).
 * Speech to the Labour Party conference (3 October 1995).

 * The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth, and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.
 * As quoted in "Socialism is So Hot Right Now" (17 September 2018), by Jonah Goldberg, Commentary

 * Socialism for me was never about nationalization or the power of the state, not just about economics or even politics. It is a moral purpose to life, a set of values, a belief in society, in co-operation, in achieving together what we cannot achieve alone. It is how I try to live my life, how you try to live yours—the simple truths—I am worth no more than anyone else, I am my brother’s keeper, I will not walk by on the other side. We are not simply people set in isolation from one another, face to face with eternity, but members of the same family, same community, same human race. This is my socialism and the irony of all our long years in opposition is that those values are shared by the vast majority of the British people.
 * As quoted in "Socialism is So Hot Right Now" (17 September 2018), by Jonah Goldberg, Commentary

 * I can't stand politicians who wear God on their sleeves.
 * Sunday Telegraph (7 April 1996).

 * Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education and education. We are 35th in the world league of education standards – 35th. At every level, radical improvement and reform.
 * Speech to party conference (October 1996)
 * "We are back as the people's party, says Blair", The Times (2 October 1996).
 * Speech to Labour Party conference (1 October 1996).

 * If there are further steps to European integration, the people should have their say at a general election or in a referendum.
 * "New Britain: My vision of a young country", p. 70.

 * In the end there is no escaping from the fact that businesses run business. And the best thing government can do is set a framework within which business has the stability to plan and invest in the future [...] I want a situation more like the Democrats and the Republicans in the US. People don't even question for a single moment that the Democrats are pro-business party. They should not be asking the question about the New Labour [...] New Labour is pro-business, pro-enterprise, and we believe there is nothing inconsistent between that and a decent and just society.
 * (16 January 1997). Quoted in

 * Isn't it extraordinary that the Prime Minister of our country can't even urge his Party to back his own position. Weak! Weak! Weak!
 * Prime Ministers Questions (30 January 1997).

 * Powers that are constitutionally there can be used but the Scottish Labour Party is not planning to raise income tax and once the power is given it is like any parish council: it's got the right to exercise it.
 * The Scotsman (4 April 1997).
 * Asked whether he would intervene to prevent the Scottish Parliament from raising taxes.

 * Sovereignty rests with me as an English MP and that's the way it will stay.
 * ibid.

May 1997–1999

 * A new dawn has broken, has it not?
 * Victory speech at Labour election-night party, Royal Festival Hall, London (2 May 1997).

 * My message to Sinn Fein is clear. The settlement train is leaving. I want you on that train. But it is leaving anyway and I will not allow it to wait for you.
 * David McKittrick, "Blair offers a fresh start for Irish peace", The Independent, 17 May 1997, p. 1.
 * Speech at the Royal Ulster Agricultural Show (16 May 1997).

 * I was born in 1953, a child of the Cold War era, raised amid the constant fear of a conflict with the potential to destroy humanity. Whatever other dangers may exist, no such fear exists today. Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war. That is a prize beyond value.
 * Martin Bentham, "You're the boss, Tony", The Sun (28 May 1997), p. 2.
 * Speech at a summit in Paris between NATO and Russia (27 May 1997).

 * She was the people's princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories for ever.
 * Frank Millar, "Shocked Britain mourns loss of Princess Diana in Paris car crash", Irish Times, 1 September 1997, p. 1.
 * Statement on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales (31 August 1997).

 * I would never do anything to harm the country or anything improper. I think most people who have dealt with me think I'm a pretty straight sort of guy, and I am.
 * Trevor Kavanagh, "Blair: My big blunder", The Sun, 17 November 1997, p. 8.
 * Interview with John Humphrys on BBC TV's On the Record (16 November 1997).

 * A day like today is not a day for, sort of, soundbites, really - we can leave those at home - but I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders, I really do.
 * Julia Langdon, "The gloves are off in the Speaker's corner", Herald (Glasgow), 9 April 1998, p. 21.
 * Statement to the press on arriving at Hillsborough Castle for the Northern Ireland talks (7 April 1998).

 * We do, as a new Government, have to be extremely careful after 18 years in opposition. A lot of people who worked for us, they then go on and work for the lobby firms. I think we have to be very careful with people fluttering around the new Government, trying to make all sorts of claims of influence, that we are purer than pure, that people understand that we will not have any truck with anything that is improper in any shape or form at all.
 * David Hughes, "'Don't flutter around us' Blair warns lobbyists", Daily Mail (8 July 1998), p. 2.
 * After a scandal about lobbying and access; this statement is often misremembered as "whiter than white".

 * A New Britain where the extraordinary talent of the British people is liberated from the forces of conservatism that so long have held them back, to create a model 21st century nation, based not on privilege, class or background, but on the equal worth of all.
 * Tony Blair's speech in full, BBC News online
 * Speech to the Labour Party conference (28 September 1999).

 * I can stand here today, leader of the Labour Party, Prime Minister, and say to the British people: you have never had it so … prudent.
 * Tony Blair's speech in full, BBC News online
 * Speech to the Labour Party conference (28 September 1999), paraphrasing Harold Macmillan's statement "most of our people have never had it so good" and comparing with Gordon Brown's frequent use of the word "prudent".

2000–2003

 * We have done all that, but lots of people like you say because it's not perfect, you've done nothing and therefore I'm walking away from it – it's pathetic. And as for this rubbish that we took the whole of the social services budget and blew it on Kosovo – first of all, the figures are nonsense; secondly, I want to tell you this about Kosovo. I think the day that this movement, with its values, when we could do something about it, would walk away from the worst case of ethnic cleansing and racial genocide since the second world war, then we'd have something to be ashamed of.
 * Answer at a Labour Party question-and-answer meeting (January 2000), quoted in Michael Cockerell, 'The secret world of Tony Blair', New Statesman (14 February 2000)

 * There have been the most terrible, shocking events taking place in the United States of America within the last hour or so, including two hijacked planes being flown deliberately into the World Trade Center. I am afraid we can only imagine the terror and the carnage there and the many, many innocent people who will have lost their lives. I know that you would want to join with me in sending the deepest condolences to President Bush and to the American people on behalf of the British people at these terrible events. This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today. It is perpetrated by fanatics who are utterly indifferent to the sanctity of human life and we, the democracies of this world, are going to have to come together to fight it together and eradicate this evil completely from our world.
 * Trades Union Congress
 * Speech to the Trades Union Congress (11 September 2001), shortly after the World Trade Center terrorist attack had begun.

 * When we act to bring to account those that committed the atrocity of September 11, we do so, not out of bloodlust. We do so because it is just. We do not act against Islam. The true followers of Islam are our brothers and sisters in this struggle. Bin Laden is no more obedient to the proper teaching of the Koran than those Crusaders of the 12th century who pillaged and murdered, represented the teaching of the Gospel. It is time the west confronted its ignorance of Islam. Jews, Muslims and Christians are all children of Abraham. This is the moment to bring the faiths closer together in understanding of our common values and heritage, a source of unity and strength. It is time also for parts of Islam to confront prejudice against America and not only Islam but parts of western societies too. America has its faults as a society, as we have ours. But I think of the Union of America born out of the defeat of slavery. I think of its Constitution, with its inalienable rights granted to every citizen still a model for the world. I think of a black man, born in poverty, who became chief of their armed forces and is now secretary of state Colin Powell and I wonder frankly whether such a thing could have happened here. I think of the Statue of Liberty and how many refugees, migrants and the impoverished passed its light and felt that if not for them, for their children, a new world could indeed be theirs. I think of a country where people who do well, don't have questions asked about their accent, their class, their beginnings but have admiration for what they have done and the success they've achieved. I think of those New Yorkers I met, still in shock, but resolute; the fire fighters and police, mourning their comrades but still head held high.  I think of all this and I reflect: yes, America has its faults, but it is a free country, a democracy, it is our ally and some of the reaction to September 11 betrays a hatred of America that shames those that feel it.  So I believe this is a fight for freedom. And I want to make it a fight for justice too. Justice not only to punish the guilty. But justice to bring those same values of democracy and freedom to people round the world.  And I mean: freedom, not only in the narrow sense of personal liberty but in the broader sense of each individual having the economic and social freedom to develop their potential to the full. That is what community means, founded on the equal worth of all.  The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.  This is a moment to seize. The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us. Today, humankind has the science and technology to destroy itself or to provide prosperity to all. Yet science can't make that choice for us. Only the moral power of a world acting as a community, can. "By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more together than we can alone". For those people who lost their lives on September 11 and those that mourn them; now is the time for the strength to build that community. Let that be their memorial.
 * Speech to the 2001 Labour Party Conference (2 October 2001).

 * For the moment, let me say this: Saddam Hussein's regime is despicable, he is developing weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot leave him doing so unchecked. He is a threat to his own people and to the region and, if allowed to develop these weapons, a threat to us also.
 * Hansard, House of Commons 6th series, vol. 383, col. 23.
 * House of Commons statement on discussions with President Bush over the Middle East (10 April 2002).

 * I don't like it, to be honest, when politicians make a big thing of their religious beliefs, so I don't make a big thing of it.
 * BBC Newsnight
 * Interview with Jeremy Paxman (16 May 2002).

 * Look, I'm a person, an individual with a character and part of my character is about what I believe in and part of my beliefs obviously is a religious conviction. I simply hesitate whenever I get drawn into this territory because I have found, over time, that it either leads to people misunderstanding the basis upon which you are taking decisions or it leads to people trying to colonise God or religion for one particular political position. I make no claims to that at all.
 * BBC Newsnight
 * Interview with Jeremy Paxman (16 May 2002).

 * [The Joint Intelligence Committee] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population, and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.
 * Hansard House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 390, col. 3.
 * House of Commons statement on publication of the dossier concerning Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction (24 September 2002).

 * Sometimes, and in particular dealing with a dictator, the only chance of peace is a readiness for war.
 * Speech to the Labour conference in Blackpool (2 October 2002). Echoing an old latin proverb, Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, be prepared for war).

 * Lead me into war...you know I believe in you.
 *  Meeting with George W. Bush on January 31, 2003.

 * The intelligence is clear: [Saddam Hussein] continues to believe that his weapons of mass destruction programme is essential both for internal repression and for external aggression. It is essential to his regional power. Prior to the inspectors coming back in, he was engaged in a systematic exercise in concealment of those weapons.
 * Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 400, col. 123.
 * House of Commons statement on Iraq (25 February 2003).

 * I've never claimed to have a monopoly of wisdom, but one thing I've learned in this job is you should always try to do the right thing, not the easy thing. Let the day-to-day judgments come and go: be prepared to be judged by history.
 * Jackie Ashley in Madrid, and Ewen MacAskill, "'History will be my judge': Tony Blair, in an exclusive interview, says demos and rebels will not deflect him over Iraq" The Guardian'' (28 February 2003).

 * If we don't act now, we can't keep those people down there forever. We can't wait forever. If we don't act now, then we will go back to what has happened before and then of course the whole thing begins again and he carries on developing these weapons and these are dangerous weapons, particularly if they fall into the hands of terrorists who we know want to use these weapons if they can get them.
 * Prime Minister's website
 * Appearing in "MTV Forum - Is War the Answer?", recorded on 6 March 2003, transmitted on 11 March 2003.

 * We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years–contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence–Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.
 * Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 301, col. 762.
 * House of Commons debate on Iraq (18 March 2003).

 * This is the time not just for this Government–or, indeed, for this Prime Minister—but for this House to give a lead: to show that we will stand up for what we know to be right; to show that we will confront the tyrannies and dictatorships and terrorists who put our way of life at risk; to show, at the moment of decision, that we have the courage to do the right thing.
 * Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 301, cols. 773-774.
 * Conclusion of speech in the House of Commons debate on Iraq (18 March 2003).

 * Before people crow about the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, I suggest they wait a bit.
 * Prime Minister's monthly press conference, April 2003, Prime Minister's website (28 April 2003).

 * As I have said throughout, I have no doubt that they will find the clearest possible evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
 * Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 406, col. 161.
 * Replying to questions following statement on the G8 summit, House of Commons (4 June 2003).

 * What amazes me is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don't get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let's get rid of them all. I don't because I can't, but when you can you should.
 * Michael Ignatieff, "Why Are We In Iraq? (And Liberia? And Afghanistan?)", The New York Times (5 September 2003).

 * We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.
 * Peter Beaumont, "PM admits graves claim 'untrue'", The Observer, 18 July, 2004.
 * Statement reported in "Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves" produced by USAID (20 November 2003).

 * I thought that it was the most predictable speech that we could have heard from the right hon. and learned Gentleman. He may want to pose as the nice Dr. Jekyll, but we know that, deep down, he is still the same old Mr. Howard.
 * Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 415, col. 23.
 * Debate on the Queen's Speech (26 November 2003).

2004–June 2007

 * It has been an unrelenting, but, I have to accept, at least partly successful campaign to persuade Britain that Europe is a conspiracy aimed at us, rather than a partnership designed for us and others to pursue our national interest properly in a modern, interdependent world. It is right to confront this campaign head on. Provided that the treaty embodies the essential British positions, we shall agree to it as a Government. Once agreed – either at the June Council, which is our preference, or subsequently – Parliament should debate it in detail and decide upon it. Then, let the people have the final say.
 * Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 420, col. 157.
 * House of Commons Statement on the publication White Paper on Europe (20 April 2004).

 * What you can't do is have a situation where you get a rejection of the treaty and then you just bring it back with a few amendments and say we will have another go. You can't do that and I am not going to get drawn into speculating the way forward because I don't intend to lose the referendum.
 * Prime Minister's monthly press conference (22 April 2004).

 * Today's strategy is the culmination of a journey of change both for progressive politics and for the country. It marks the end of the 1960s liberal, social consensus on law and order.
 * But with this change in the 1960s came something else, not necessarily because of it but alongside it. It was John Stuart Mill who articulated the modern concept that with freedom comes responsibility. But in the 1960's revolution, that didn't always happen. Law and order policy still focussed on the offender's rights, protecting the innocent, understanding the social causes of their criminality. All through the 1970s and 1980s, under Labour and Conservative Governments, a key theme of legislation was around the prevention of miscarriages of justice. Meanwhile some took the freedom without the responsibility. The worst criminals became better organised and more violent. The petty criminals were no longer the bungling but wrong-headed villains of old; but drug pushers and drug-abusers, desperate and without any residual moral sense. And a society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others.
 * Here, now, today, people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus. People do not want a return to old prejudices and ugly discrimination. But they do want rules, order and proper behaviour. They know there is such a thing as society. They want a society of respect. They want a society of responsibility. They want a community where the decent law-abiding majority are in charge; where those that play by the rules do well; and those that don't, get punished.
 * Speech (19 July 2004), quoted in 'Tony Blair – 2004 Speech on Law and Order', UKPOL (12 September 2015)

 * Do I know I'm right? Judgements aren't the same as facts. Instinct is not science. I'm like any other human being, as fallible and as capable of being wrong. I only know what I believe.
 * Full text of Blair's speech, BBC News online
 * Speech to the Labour Party Conference (28 September 2004), referring to the fact that no WMDs had been found in Iraq.

 * Don't say yes to that question, that would be difficult.
 * CNN.com
 * At a joint press conference with George W. Bush (13 November 2004). Blair interrupted when a reporter asked Bush if he sees Blair as his poodle.

 * It is not a sensible or intelligent response for us in Europe to ridicule American argument or parody their political leadership.
 * Speech at the Lord Mayor's Banquet (15 November 2004).
 * Urging Europe to stop ridiculing American President George W. Bush.

 * Sir Michael Spicer: What are the characteristics of old Labour that he dislikes so much? Tony Blair: I am afraid that the Hon. Gentleman will have to repeat that. Sir Michael Spicer: What are the characteristics of old Labour that he dislikes so much? Tony Blair: Basically, that it never won two successive terms of Government and, perhaps, that it never put the Conservative party flat on its back, which is where it is now. Thankfully, we are running an economy with low inflation, low mortgage rates and low unemployment; fortunately, we are doing a darn sight better than the Government of whom the right hon. Gentleman was a Member, who had—I thank him for allowing me to mention this—interest rates at 10 per cent. for four years, 3 million unemployed and two recessions. Whether it is old Labour or new Labour, it is a darn sight better than the Tories.
 * Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 430, col. 302.
 * In the House of Commons (26 January 2005).

 * I fear my own conscience on Africa. I fear the judgement of future generations, where history properly calculates the gravity of the suffering. I fear them asking: but how could wealthy people, so aware of such suffering, so capable of acting, simply turn away to busy themselves with other things? What greater call to action could there be? Did they really know and yet do nothing? I feel that judgement of the future alongside the now. It gives me urgency. It fills me with determination.
 * Prime Minister's website
 * At the launch of the Commission for Africa Report (11 March 2005).

 * Yes, I did have to struggle very hard to get this [the vote on the Iraq war] through, but the reason I did it was because I thought it was the right thing to do. I didn't take this on myself... just because I thought, 'Let's give myself a really hard time for a couple of years!'
 * On BBC ''Question Time's election special programme, (28 April 2005).

 * I understand there is a need for a stable and orderly transition to that leadership, but that people should give me the space to ensure that happens and that this debate is not best conducted in the pages of the Mail on Sunday.
 * Michael White, "I will go in my own time – Blair", The Guardian (12 May 2005), p. 2.
 * Speech to the Parliamentary Labour Party (11 May 2005); the 'leadership' referred to was that of his successor, assumed to be Gordon Brown.

 * Ideals survive through change. They die through inertia in the face of challenge.
 * European Parliament debates
 * Speech to the European Parliament outlining the priorities of the British Presidency, (23 June 2005).

 * It is important that those engaged in terrorism realise that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world.
 * Trevor Kavanagh, "We shall prevail .. terrorists shall not", The Sun (8 July 2005), p. 18
 * Statement from Scotland's Gleneagles Hotel, in response to the terrorist attack on the London Underground (7 July 2005).

 * The spirit of our age is one in which the prejudices of the past are put behind us, where our diversity is our strength. It is this which is under attack. Moderates are not moderate through weakness but through strength. Now is the time to show it in defence of our common values.
 * "Prime Minister Blair's speech", The New York Times (16 July 2005).
 * Speech to the Labour Party's National Policy Forum.

 * The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge.
 * Address to the 2005 G8 climate change summit in London, as reported by David Adam, "Blair signals shift over climate change", The Guardian (1 November 2005).

 * Sometimes it is better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing.
 * Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 439, col. 302 (9 November 2005).
 * Responding to Charles Kennedy in the House of Commons during Prime Minister's Questions. Blair was referring to the likely defeat in Parliament of additional powers to detain terror suspects without charge, which happened later that day.

 * There were people who got me very involved in politics. But then there was also a book. It was a trilogy, a biography of Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher, which made a very deep impression on me and gave me a love of political biography for the rest of my life.
 * Cahal Milmo, "Blair reveals an unexpected influence: Trotsky", The Independent (3 March 2006).
 * Speech to the Commonwealth Club, London, 2 March 2006.

 * This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation.
 * "Clash about civilisations" speech, Prime Minister's website.
 * Foreign Policy speech at Reuters Headquarters, London (21 March 2006).

 * To state a timetable now would simply paralyze the proper working of government, put at risk the changes we are making for Britain and damage the country.
 * Prime Minister's monthly press conference May 2006, Prime Minister's website.
 * Refusing to set a date for his retirement (8 May 2006).

 * He is honey.
 * Andrew Porter, "Blair and Bush on tape, The Sun (18 July 2006).
 * Tony Blair to George W. Bush, talking about UN chief Kofi Annan, at the G8 summit (17 July 2006). Bush's microphone had been left on by mistake.

 * We can only protect liberty by making it relevant to the modern world.
 * In full: Tony Blair's speech, BBC News online. Final speech to the Labour Party Annual Conference as Leader (26 September 2006).

 * He wants a Bill of Rights for Britain drafted by a Committee of Lawyers. Have you ever tried drafting anything with a Committee of Lawyers?
 * In full: Tony Blair's speech, BBC News online
 * Attacking David Cameron, during his Labour Party Conference speech (26 September 2006).

 * In this day and age if you've got the technology then it's vital to use that technology to track people down. The number on the database should be the maximum number you can get.
 * BBC News online
 * Remarks while touring the Forensic Science Service, concerning the police DNA database (23 October 2006).

 * That's the art of leadership. To make sure that what shouldn't happen, doesn't happen.
 * Interview with Newsweek.
 * Interview with Newsweek.

 * I couldn't live with myself if I thought that these big strategic choices for my generation were there, and I wasn't even making them – or I was making them according to what was expedient rather than what I actually thought was right.

 * In respect of knife and gun gangs, the laws need to be significantly toughened. There needs to be an intensive police focus on these groups. The ring-leaders need to be identified and taken out of circulation; if very young, as some are, put in secure accommodation. The black community – the vast majority of whom in these communities are decent, law-abiding people horrified at what is happening – need to be mobilised in denunciation of this gang culture that is killing innocent young black kids. But we won't stop this by pretending it isn't young black kids doing it.
 * Callaghan lecture in Cardiff (11 April 2007), quoted in Patrick Wintour and Vikram Dodd, 'Blair blames spate of murders on black culture', The Guardian (12 April 2007) and 'Tony Blair – 2007 Callaghan Memorial Speech', UKPOL (12 September 2015)

 * Economic inequality is a factor and we should deal with that, but I don't think it's the thing that is producing the most violent expression of this social alienation. I think that is to do with the fact that particular youngsters are being brought up in a setting that has no rules, no discipline, no proper framework around them.
 * Callaghan lecture in Cardiff (11 April 2007), quoted in Patrick Wintour and Vikram Dodd, 'Blair blames spate of murders on black culture', The Guardian (12 April 2007)

 * So, of course, the visions are painted in the colours of the rainbow, and the reality is sketched in duller tones of black and white and grey. But I ask you to accept one thing. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That is your call. But believe one thing, if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country.
 * "Full text of Tony Blair's resignation speech", Times Online (10 May 2007).
 * Announcing his impending resignation, Trimdon Labour Club (10 May 2007).

 * The British are special. The world knows it. In our innermost thoughts we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth. So it has been an honour to serve it. I give my thanks to you, the British people, for the times that I have succeeded, and my apologies to you for the times I have fallen short. But good luck.
 * "Full text of Tony Blair's resignation speech", Times Online (10 May 2007).
 * Announcing his impending resignation, Trimdon Labour Club (10 May 2007).

 * The fear of missing out means today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no-one dares miss out.
 * Lecture on Our Nation's Future - Public Life, Reuters (12 June 2007).

 * The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."
 * ""Blair launches stinging attack on 'absurd' British Islamists" The Observer (1 July 2007).
 * Remarks made on the eve of his departure from Downing Street (26 June 2007).

 * Some may belittle politics but we who are engaged in it know that it is where people stand tall. Although I know that it has many harsh contentions, it is still the arena that sets the heart beating a little faster. If it is, on occasions, the place of low skulduggery, it is more often the place for the pursuit of noble causes. I wish everyone, friend or foe, well. That is that. The end.
 * Hansard, Last official words as Prime Minister, said at Prime Minister's Questions (27 June 2007).

October 2007–2017

 * Analogies with the past are never properly accurate and analogies especially with the rising fascism can be easily misleading, but in pure chronology I sometimes wonder if we're not in the 1920s or 1930s again... This ideology now has a state, Iran, that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries whose people wish to live in peace.

 * I think this has gone beyond, as it were, Al Qaida as a specific network. I mean, this is -- there is no central command in this ideology, the way that, you know, you would normally describe one unit of -- that leads and operation. It's not like that. But the fact is that they are loosely linked by an ideology. They have very strong links with each other, right across the national boundaries. And you know, would be no surprise to me if the people that were engaged in the Mumbai attacks had links with other countries as well.
 * CNN (7 December 2008).

 * Brexit reminds me a bit of the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles where the sheriff, at one point during it, holds a gun to his own head and says: "If you don't do what I want I'll blow my brains out" - you want to watch that one of the 26 (other EU members) don't say just go ahead.
 * David Cameron promises in/out referendum on EU BBC News (23 January 2013)

 * We should engage with the new de facto power and help make the new government make the changes necessary, especially on the economy, so they can deliver for the people. The events that led to the Egyptian army's removal of President Mohamed Morsi confronted the military with a simple choice: intervention or chaos. Seventeen million people on the streets are not the same as an election. But it as an awesome manifestation of power. I am a strong supporter of democracy. But democratic government doesn't on its own mean effective government. Today efficacy is the challenge. This is a sort of free democratic spirit that operates outside the convention of democracy that elections decide the government. It is enormously fuelled by social media, itself a revolutionary phenomenon. And it moves very fast in precipitating crisis. It is not always consistent or rational. A protest is not a policy, or a placard a programme for government. But if governments don't have a clear argument with which to rebut the protest, they're in trouble.
 * "Blair justifying the Egyptians army actions on removing Morsi" The Guardian (6 July 2013).

 * The battles of this century … are less likely to be the product of extreme political ideology—like those of the 20th century— but they could easily be fought around the questions of cultural or religious difference.
 * As attributed without citation in Awake! magazine (anonymous), January 2015

 * I pay tribute to the campaign [ Jeremy Corbyn] ran, I think that he showed a lot of character in the way that he ran that campaign. He generated a lot of enthusiasm. I buy all of that. But I also think that it's important and salutary for us to remember this government is in a greater degree of mess than any government I can remember. Even in the 1990s the Tory government was a paragon of stability compared with this, and yet we're a couple of points ahead and I think I'm right that [Corbyn] is not yet ahead of her as Prime Minister. So I pay tribute to all of that, but I still say 'Come on guys, we should be 15, 20 points ahead.
 * Interviewed on Today (BBC Radio 4 (11 November 2017).
 * Referring to the 2017 United Kingdom general election. The Conservative Prime Minister was Theresa May.

Quotes about Blair

 * Torture, encouraged from above, became a fact of life [in occupied Iraq]. Perhaps some good liberal apologist for Blair will soon explain how democratic torture is much nicer than authoritarian torture.
 * Tariq Ali, For one day only, I'm a Lib Dem" The Guardian (26 March 2005)

 * A second-rate actor, he turned out to be a crafty and avaricious politician, but without much substance; bereft of ideas he eagerly grasped and tried to improve upon the legacy of Margaret Thatcher.
 * Tariq Ali, CounterPunch, (10 May 2007).

 * The trouble with Tony is that he always believes what he is saying when he is saying it.
 * Liberal Democrat politician Paddy Ashdown was quoted as saying this by Conservative politician Ken Clarke in his autobiography, Kind of Blue.

 * [Blair] is a lightweight. I don't like his political morals and how he's been enriching himself since leaving office. He preaches high moral language but … I have a visceral contempt for Blair. Not dislike. Just contempt.
 * Zbigniew Brzezinski (13 January 2012)

 * He was the future, once...
 * David Cameron on Blair during their first exchange in Prime Ministerial Questions.

 * Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's failures are still writ large on the public imagination – the Iraq War for example, or the racking up of astonishing national debt. But what is less well recognised is the last Labour government’s extraordinary success in using seemingly mundane pieces of legislation to profoundly – and, for conservatives, detrimentally – transform the culture of the United Kingdom. In its 2005 manifesto, the Labour Party pledged to bring forward a new Equality Bill, to "modernise and simplify" equality laws. A bland aim perhaps, but the resulting Equality Act 2010 became a flagship piece of New Labour legislation that would embed leftist identity politics into our public institutions, paving the way for the ideological capture of our schools, civil service and NHS.
 * Miriam Cates, 'Tony Blair is still ruining Britain', The Daily Telegraph (22 January 2024)

 * Don’t be shameless, Mr Blair. Don’t be immoral, Mr. Blair. You are one of those who have no morals. You are not one who has the right to criticize anyone about the rules of the international community. You are an imperialist pawn who attempts to curry favor with Danger Bush-Hitler, the number one mass murderer and assassin there is on the planet. Go straight to hell, Mr. Blair.
 * Hugo Chavez responding to Blair, which he urged Venezuela to abide by the rules of the international community. (February 2006) 12

 * Like anyone else who knows anything about the Middle East, you just pray that this man will shut the fuck up.
 * William Dalrymple, June 2014,

 * Tony Blair had his finger on the modernising pulse of Britain in the 90s, identifying the UK as a country that was increasingly progressive and outward-looking, and with little time for passing judgement on the basis of gender, race, sexuality or disability. And it was this analysis which caught the public mood and helped sweep Labour to its historic landslide victory on 1 May 1997. As a party with equality at its core, the new government was eager to get on with advancing the fairness agenda and building on the work done by pioneers such as Barbara Castle.
 * Angela Eagle, 'The backlash against equality is here', The New Statesman (10 April 2017)

 * The righteous will evidently never tire of the pelting and taunting of Tony Blair, and perhaps those like him who choose to join the Roman choir of extreme unctuousness must expect their meed of abuse. But I cannot forget the figures of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein, who made terrified fiefdoms out of their "own" people and mounds of corpses on the territory of their neighbours. I was glad to see each of these monsters brought to trial, and think the achievement should (and one day will) form part of the battle‑honours of British Labour. Many of the triumphant pelters and taunters would have left the dictators and aggressors in place: they too will have their place in history.
 * Christopher Hitchens, September 5, 2010,

 * In November 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair had his only meeting with independent British experts. “We all pretty much said the same thing,” said George Joffe, a Middle East specialist from Cambridge University. “Iraq is a very complicated country, there are tremendous intercommunal resentments, and don’t imagine you’ll be welcomed.” Blair did not appear interested in this analysis and focused instead on Saddam Hussein: “But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?” The experts tried to explain that thirty years of Hussein’s dictatorship had ground down Iraq’s civil society to the point that there were virtually no independent organized forces to serve as allies for the coalition. Blair remained uninterested. The Foreign Office showed no more interest in taking advantage of their considerable knowledge and expertise. A little more than five years later, in January 2008, the U.K. Ministry of Defence issued a report that was severely critical of the way in which British soldiers were prepared to serve in Iraq. There had been, the report said, a lack of information about the context the soldiers would be operating in and uncertainty about how the Iraqis might react to an invasion. The military, the report went on, failed to anticipate differences between Iraq and the Balkans and Northern Ireland where British forces had gained a great deal of their recent experience. In other words, they had not looked at the history of Iraq.
 * Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History (2008), pp. 160-161
 * Few talk or think about Iraq these days; the media ignores this important but demolished nation. Iraq, let us recall, was the target of a major western aggression concocted by George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Britain’s Tony Blair, and financed and encouraged by the Gulf oil sheikdoms and Saudi Arabia... We hear nothing about the billions of dollars of Iraqi oil being extracted by big US oil firms since 2003.
 * Eric Margolis in The forgotten plunder of Iraq, (November 17, 2019)

 * Like millions of others, I now bitterly resent that a prime minister could use such a farrago of lies and manipulation to deceive us and to take the nation to war so dishonestly.
 * Michael Meacher, The Guardian (1 December 2006).

 * Somebody who did it first and perhaps did it better than I will do. He has been an example for so many people around the world of what dedicated leadership can accomplish.
 * Barack Obama CNN (5 February 2009).
 * I believe Tony Blair is an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged. I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head, and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster. To the extent that he even believes what he says, he is delusional. To the extent that he does not, he is an actor whose first invention — himself — has been his only interesting role.
 * Matthew Parris "No more excuses. Just hand in your homework and go, Prime Minister", The Times (18 March 2006).

 * What can we do? We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history. We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar. We can turn the war on Iraq into a fishbowl of the U.S. government's excesses. We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair-and their allies for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners, and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are.
 * Arundhati Roy War Talk (2003)

 * I view him as the kind of air guitarist of political rhetoric. I don't think he's debased political debate because he lies, I actually sadly think he believes a lot of what he says, that's what's so depressing about it, for people who stand outside of politics. So my rather bizarre viewpoint — should he go? — it feels like he left a long time ago, leaving this Tony Blair shaped hole that carries on talking."
 * Will SelfBBC Radio (29 September 2006).

 * Blair likes to say that his party is best when it is bold. So is he--and when he has an unconflicted view of the right and wrong of an issue... Blair is not at his best when his vision of what is right is blurred.
 * Irwin Stelzer, "Letter from Londonistan" (1 August 2005), The Weekly Standard

 * Among the many challenges you faced with great courage, may I just mention two. You stayed close to our American ally in difficult times. And because of you we saw an end to the horrors of genocide in the Balkans.
 * Margaret Thatcher to Blair (21 June 2007), quoted in Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher. The Authorized Biography, Volume Three: Herself Alone (2019), p. 778

 * Tony Blair, a passionate Christian, has expressed his conviction that WMDs will be found in almost directly religious terms of credo quia absurdum: despite the lack of evidence, he personally is deeply convinced that they will be found. ... The only appropriate answer to this conundrum is not the boring liberal plea for innocence until guilt is proved but, rather, the point made succintly by 'Rachel from Scotland' on the BBC website in September 2003: 'We know he had weapons; we sold him some of them.' This is the direction a serious investigation should have taken.
 * Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, p. 12. ISBN 1844675408.

 * In the early days of his government, Tony Blair liked to paraphrase the famous joke from Monty Python's Life of Brian ('All right, but apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?') in order ironically to disarm his critics: 'They betrayed socialism. True, they brought more social security, they did a lot for healthcare and education, and so on, but, in spite of all that, they betrayed socialism.' As it is clear today, it is, rather, the reverse which applies: 'We remain socialists. True, we practice Thatcherism in economics, we attack asylum-seekers, beggars and single mothers, we made a deal with Murdoch, and so on, but, none the less, we're still socialists.'
 * Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, p. 70. ISBN 1844675408.

 * UK’s Prime Minister Tony Blair should hang with the U.S. gang, but who is calling for this? How much longer will the necessary prosecutions wait? Till after these international war-criminals have all gone honored to their graves?Although the International Criminal Court considered and dismissed possible criminal charges against Tony Blair’s UK Government regarding the invasion and military occupation of Iraq, the actual crime, of invading and militarily occupying a country which had posed no threat to the national security of the invader, was ignored, and the conclusion was that “the situation did not appear to meet the required threshold of the Statute” (which was only “Willful killing or inhuman treatment of civilians” and which ignored the real crime, which was “aggressive war” or “the crime of aggression” — the crime for which Nazis had been hanged at Nuremberg)... We... now have internationally a lawless world (or “World Order”) in which “Might makes right,” and in which there is really no effective international law, at all.
 * Eric Zuesse, Why U.S. Must Be Prosecuted for Its War Crimes Against Iraq, American Herald Tribune, (16 May 2020)

title: Tony Blair


text:
Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag (16 January 1933 – 28 December 2004) was an American essayist, literary critic, cultural theorist, and political activist.
 * See also:
 * On Photography (1977)

Quotes

 * Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.
 * Review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil, The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963)

 * The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
 * Review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil, The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963)

 * The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
 * The Benefactor (1963), Ch. 1, p. 1, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42012-9

 * The work of Kafka … has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God.
 * "Against Interpretation" (1964), in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

 * If America is the culmination of Western white civilisation, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilisation.
 * Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57

 * The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
 * Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57

 * We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.
 * "Women, the Arts, & the Politics of Culture: An Interview with Susan Sontag" in Salmagundi, No. 31-32 (Fall/Winter 1975), p. 29; later published in Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995) edited by Leland A. Poague, p. 77

 * Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
 * Fascism" (1974), published in The New York Review of Books (6 February 1975) and reprinted in Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), p. 92, ISBN 0312420080

 * In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community.
 * "Fascinating Fascism" (1974), published in The New York Review of Books (6 February 1975) and reprinted in Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), p. 93

 * Sadomasochism has always been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love. It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years. Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.
 * "Fascinating Fascism" (1974), published in The New York Review of Books (6 February 1975) and reprinted in Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), p. 105

I've already gone. Regretfully, exultantly. A prouder lyricism. It's not Paradise that's lost. Advice. Move along, let's get cracking, don’t hold me down, he travels fastest who travels alone. Let's get the show on the road. Get up, slugabed. I'm clearing out of here. Get your ass in gear. Sleep faster, we need the pillow. She's racing, he's stalling. If I go this fast, I won't see anything. If I slow down — Everything. — then I won't have seen everything before it disappears. Everywhere. I've been everywhere. I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. Land's end. But there's water, O my heart. And salt on my tongue. The end of the world. This is not the end of the world.
 * A curious word, wanderlust. I'm ready to go.
 * "Unguided Tour", in The New Yorker (31 October 1977), final lines; also in I, Etcetera (1977)

 * Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
 * Illness As Metaphor (1978), foreword, p. 3, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-374-52073-9

 * There is a peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, as of everything else. Psychologizing seems to provide control over the experiences and events (like grave illnesses) over which people have in fact little or no control. Psychological understanding undermines the "reality" of a disease. That reality has to be explained. (It really means; or is a symbol of; or must be interpreted so.) For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.
 * Illness As Metaphor (1978), ch. 7 (pp. 55-56)

 * One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling... which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. We have more or less the same bodies, but very different kinds of thoughts. I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking.
 * "Susan Sontag: The Rolling Stone Interview" with Jonathan Cott (1978; published 4 October 1979)

 * Not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies — especially when their populations are moved to revolt — but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.
 * Speech, Town Hall, New York City (6 February 1982), reported in "Susan Sontag Provokes Debate on Communism", The New York Times (27 February 1982), p. 27

 * The tide of undecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents which has washed over and bitten into the facades of monuments and the surface of public vehicles in the city where I live: graffiti as an assertion of disrespect, yes, but most of all simply an assertion... the powerless saying: I'm here, too.
 * "The Pleasure of the Image" (1985) from Writers on Artists edited by Daniel Halpern (1988), p. 98, North Point Press ISBN 0-86547-340-4

 * It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
 * Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. That illness can be not an epic of suffering but the occasion of some kind of self-transcendence is affirmed by sentimental literature and, more convincingly, by case histories offered by doctor-writers. Some illnesses seem more apt than others for this kind of meditation.
 * AIDS and Its Metaphors, (1989), ch. 4, p. 125, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42013-7 ; later published in combination with Illness As Metaphor. This combined edition is the one referenced here.

 * Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens — and real diseases are useful material. Epidemic diseases usually elicit a call to ban the entry of foreigners, immigrants. And xenophobic propaganda has always depicted immigrants as bearers of disease (in the late nineteenth century: cholera, yellow fever, typhoid fever, tuberculosis). … Such is the extraordinary potency and efficacy of the plague metaphor: it allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable "others" and as (potentially) everyone's disease.
 * AIDS and Its Metaphors, (1989), ch. 6, p. 149

 * The AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.
 * AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), p. 180

 * I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.
 * "The Risk Taker", profile/interview by Gary Younge, The Guardian (19 January 2002)

 * I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
 * "Susan Sontag Finds Romance", interview with by Leslie Garis, The New York Times (2 August 1992)

 * I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
 * "Susan Sontag Finds Romance," interview by Leslie Garis, The New York Times (2 August 1992)

 * To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.
 * "Susan Sontag Finds Romance," interview by Leslie Garis, The New York Times (2 August 1992)

 * Modernist tasks and liberties have stirred up a canny diffidence among painters of the largest accomplishment when pressed to talk about their art. It appears unseemly, or naive, to have much to say about the pictures or to attach to them any explicit "program." No more theories expounding an ideal way of painting. And, as statements wither and with them counter-statements, hardly anything in the way of provocation either. Decorum suggests that artists sound somewhat trapped when being drawn out, and venturing a few cagey glimpses of intention.
 * "About Hodgkin," from Howard Hodgkin Paintings edited by Michael Auping (1995), p. 105, Harry N. Abrams ISBN 0-8109-3433-7

 * The sublimity of color in Hodgkin's pictures can be thought of as, first of all, expressive of gratitude — for the world that resists and survives the ego and its discontents.
 * "About Hodgkin," from Howard Hodgkin Paintings (1995), p. 109

 * Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe that let Bosnia die. A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don't take place. Wars, genocides — that happened here once, but no longer. It's something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not "really" Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all.
 * "Why Are We In Kosovo?" inThe New York Times Magazine (2 May 1999)

 * Stop the War and Stop the Genocide, read the banners being waved in the demonstrations in Rome and here in Bari. For Peace. Against War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without making war?
 * "Why Are We in Kosovo?", The New York Times (2 May 1999)

War is not simply a mistake, a failure to communicate. There is radical evil in the world, which is why there are just wars.
 * Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves as the victims. (Clinton equals Hitler, etc.) But it is grotesque to equate the casualties inflicted by the NATO bombing with the mayhem inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people in the last eight years by the Serb programs of ethnic cleansing. Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust. No forceful response to the violence of a state against peoples who are nominally its own citizens? (Which is what most "wars" are today. Not wars between states.) The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this? Is it acceptable that such slaughters be dismissed as civil wars, also known as "age-old ethnic hatreds." (After all, anti-Semitism was an old tradition in Europe; indeed, a good deal older than ancient Balkan hatreds. Would this have justified letting Hitler kill all the Jews on German territory?) Is it true that war never solved anything? (Ask a black American if he or she thinks our Civil War didn't solve anything.)
 * "Why Are We in Kosovo?", The New York Times (2 May 1999)

 * War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.
 * "Why Are We in Kosovo?", The New York Times (2 May 1999)

 * Shall I tell you about getting older? When you get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don't fancy me. I want a young man. I love beauty. So what's new?
 * "Finding fact from fiction", The Guardian (27 May 2000)

 * The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.
 * On the September 11, 2001 attacks The New Yorker: Talk of the Town (24 September 2001)

 * The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
 * The New Yorker: Talk of the Town (24 September 2001)

 * Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. 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.
 * Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), p. 101, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-374-24858-3

 * The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.
 * On Photography, 1977

Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

 * Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-28086-6

 * None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense. Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practices. This is the case, today, with the very idea of content itself. Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.
 * "Against Interpretation" (1964), p. 5

 * What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.
 * "Against Interpretation" (1964), p. 5

 * Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning.
 * p. 6

 * The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.
 * p. 6

 * Interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness.''' In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.
 * p. 6

 * Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
 * p. 7

 * To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings."
 * p. 7

 * Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.
 * "Against Interpretation" (1964), p. 8

 * In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
 * "Against Interpretation" (1964), p. 14

 * Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
 * "The Imagination of Disaster" from Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), p. 212

 * What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
 * "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), note 9, p. 279; originally published in Partisan Review, Vol. 31 No. 4, (Fall 1964)

 * The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.
 * "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), note 54, p. 291

 * Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended. ... Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises.
 * "One culture and the new sensibility", p. 296

Styles of Radical Will (1966)

 * If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature—the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society—it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there.
 * “The Pornographic Imagination,” p. 45

 * The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game
 * “The Pornographic Imagination,” p. 45

 * Since it is hardly likely that contemporary critics seriously mean to bar prose narratives that are unrealistic from the domain of literature, one suspects that a special standard is being applied to sexual themes. … There is nothing conclusive in the well-known fact that most men and women fall short of the sexual prowess that people in pornography are represented as enjoying; that the size of organs, number and duration of orgasms, variety and feasibility of sexual powers, and amount of sexual energy all seem grossly exaggerated. Yes, and the spaceships and the teeming planets depicted in science-fiction novels don’t exist either. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography or science-fiction from being literature. … The materials of the pornographic books that count as literature are, precisely, one of the extreme forms of human consciousness. Undoubtedly, many people would agree that the sexually obsessed consciousness can, in principle, enter into literature as an art form. … But then they usually add a rider to the agreement which effectively nullifies it. They require that the author have the proper “distance” from his obsessions for their rendering to count as literature. Such a standard is sheer hypocrisy, revealing one again that the values commonly applied to pornography are, in the end, those belonging to psychiatry and social affairs rather than to art. (Since Christianity upped that ante and concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been a “special case” in our culture, evoking particularly inconsistent attitudes.) Van Gogh’s paintings retain their status as art even if it seems his manner of painting owed less to a conscious choice of representational means than to his being deranged and actually seeing reality the way he painted it. … What makes a work of pornography part of the history of art rather than of trash is not distance, the superimposition of a consciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon the “deranged consciousness” of the erotically obsessed. Rather, it is the originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged consciousness itself, as incarnated in a work.
 * “The Pornographic Imagination,” pp. 45-47

 * In some respects the use of sexual obsessions as a subject for literature resembles the use of a literary subject whose validity for fewer people would contest: religious obsessions. So compared, the familiar fact of pornography’s definite, aggressive impact upon its readers looks somewhat different. Its celebrated intention of sexually stimulating readers is really a species of proselytizing. Pornography that is serious literature aims to “excite” in the same way that books which render an extreme form of religious experience aim to “convert.”
 * “The Pornographic Imagination,” pp. 47-48

 * Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.
 * “The Pornographic Imagination,” p. 69

 * For Cioran the aphoristic style is less a principle of reality than a principle of knowing: that it’s the destiny of every profound idea to be quickly checkmated by another idea, which it itself has implicitly generated.
 * “‘Thinking against oneself’: reflections on Cioran,” p. 79

 * As Cioran correctly points out, a principal danger of being overcivilized is that one all to easily relapses, out of sheer exhaustion and the unsatisfied need to be “stimulated,” into a vulgar and passive barbarism. Thus, “the man who unmasks his fictions” through an indiscriminate pursuit of the lucidity that is promoted by modern liberal culture “renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depth.” There, he concludes, “no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.”
 * “‘Thinking against oneself’: reflections on Cioran,” p. 85

Death Kit (1967)

 * Don't be too hard on the envious. Be glad you have, or had in the past, something enviable.
 * p.73 [Page numbers per the Penguin Modern Classics 2009 Edition]

 * To love one's work is a way of loving oneself, and leaves one freer to love other people. But beware the difference between loving one's work and being merely engrossed in it.
 * p.149

 * According to an old rule of psychic contagion: that absence of clarity or outright confusion in one, just one specific, local matter will end by infecting the whole of one's judgment.
 * p.160

 * Watkins said no with the practiced brusque delivery of a man who's always been rather sparing with his yes.
 * p.174

 * "It depends on me, whether I'm happy within myself."
 * p.189

 * If Diddy already knows what he does that's foolish and stupid, why can't he become wise? Act wisely. For, oh, Diddy has perceived his follies countless times. Is heartily ashamed of them, strenuously repudiates them. It's only that he doesn't understand. Not really. A hopeless, bumbling tourist in the somber labyrinth of his own consciousness.
 * p.223

 * And isn't it usually so, that lovers who share their daily lives with each other gradually find they need to put very little into words?
 * p.270

 * Necessary for Diddy the Disciplined to proceed systematically, or he'll get lost. There's a system of priorities here, as anywhere else, that Diddy might be wise to observe.
 * p.301

Salon interview (2001)

 * Interview, "The 'Traitor' Fires Back" by David Talbot, Salon.com (16 October 2001)

 * I'll take the American empire any day over the empire of what my pal Chris Hitchens calls "Islamic fascism." I'm not against fighting this enemy — it is an enemy and I'm not a pacifist. I think what happened on Sept. 11 was an appalling crime, and I'm astonished that I even have to say that, to reassure people that I feel that way. But I do feel that the Gulf War revisited is not the way to fight this enemy.

 * I'm sickened by the way that the delivery of so-called humanitarian aid is once again being used as a justification — or cover — for war.

 * As a secular person, and as a woman, I've always been appalled by the Taliban regime and would dearly like to see them toppled. I was a public critic of the regime long before the war started. But I've been told that the Northern Alliance is absolutely no better when it comes to the issue of women. The crimes against women in Afghanistan are just unthinkable; there's never been anything like it in the history of the world. So of course I would love to see that government overthrown and something less appalling put in its place. Do I think bombing is the way to do it? Of course I don't. It's not for me to speculate on this, but there are all sorts of realpolitik outcomes that one can imagine.'''

 * But just because I am a critic of Israeli policy — and in particular the occupation, simply because it is untenable, it creates a border that cannot be defended — that does not mean I believe the U.S. has brought this terrorism on itself because it supports Israel. I believe bin Laden and his supporters are using this as a pretext. If we were to change our support for Israel overnight, we would not stop these attacks. I don't think this is what it's really about. I think it truly is a jihad, I think there is such a thing. There are many levels to Islamic rage. But what we're dealing with here is a view of the U.S. as a secular, sinful society that must be humbled, and this has nothing to do with any particular aspect of American policy. In my view, there can be no compromise with such a vision. And, no, I don't think we have brought this upon ourselves, which is of course a view that has been attributed to me.

 * I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)

 * Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, (12 October 2003)

 * All modern wars, even when their aims are the traditional ones, such as territorial aggrandizement or the acquisition of scarce resources, are cast as clashes of civilizations — culture wars — with each side claiming the high ground, and characterizing the other as barbaric. The enemy is invariably a threat to "our way of life," an infidel, a desecrator, a polluter, a defiler of higher or better values. The current war against the very real threat posed by militant Islamic fundamentalism is a particularly clear example.

 * Americans have it right. Europeans are not in an evangelical — or a bellicose — mood. Indeed, sometimes I have to pinch myself to be sure I am not dreaming: that what many people in my own country now hold against Germany, which wreaked such horrors on the world for nearly a century — the new "German problem," as it were — is that Germans are repelled by war; that much of German public opinion is now virtually ... pacifist!

 * From "old" Europe's point of view, America seems bent on squandering the admiration — and gratitude — felt by most Europeans. The immense sympathy for the United States in the aftermath of the attack on September 11, 2001 was genuine. (I can testify to its resounding ardor and sincerity in Germany; I was in Berlin at the time.) But what has followed is an increasing estrangement on both sides. The citizens of the richest and most powerful nation in history have to know that America is loved, and envied ... and resented.

 * It is hard for people not to see the world in polarizing terms ("them" and us") and these terms have in the past strengthened the isolationist theme in American foreign policy as much as they now strengthen the imperialist theme. Americans have got used to thinking of the world in terms of enemies. Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always "over there," with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as the implacable, furtive menace to "our way of life." And terrorist is a more flexible word than communist. It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests.

 * Americans are constantly extolling "traditions"; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician's discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as "identities" that can be accepted as part of larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

 * The United States is a generically religious society. That is, in the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

 * "Old" and "new" are the perennial poles of all feeling and sense of orientation in the world. We cannot do without the old, because in what is old is invested all our past, our wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our sense of realism. We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism, our blind biological yearning, our ability to forget — the healing ability that makes reconciliation possible.

 * We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? It seems to me that one should always be seeking to talk oneself out of these stark oppositions.

 * The writer in me distrusts the good citizen, the "intellectual ambassador," the human rights activist — those roles which are mentioned in the citation for this prize, much as I am committed to them. The writer is more skeptical, more self-doubting, than the person who tries to do (and to support) the right thing.

 * Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another. Writers can do something to combat these clichés of our separateness, our difference — for writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences — experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

 * A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted — made cynical, superficial — by this understanding.

 * To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

Regarding the Torture of Others (2004)

 * "Regarding the Torture of Others" in The New York Times (23 May 2004)

 * An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured on digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component.

 * The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture one is inflicting on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is the primal satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn't take a picture of them.

 * People do these things to other people. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, do them when they have permission. When they are told or made to feel that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be mistreated, humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show.

 * Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies and family. What is revealed by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.

 * The Bush administration has committed the country to a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war — for "the war on terror" is nothing less than that.

 * The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent — the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of "suspects" — the principal justification for holding them is "interrogation." Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable. Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the "ticking time bomb" situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they are singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure.

Misattributed

 * Styles change, style doesn't.
 * Styles, like everything else, change. Style doesn't. - Linda Ellerbee, Move On: Adventures in the Real World (1991), p. 35 G.P. Putnam's Sons ISBN 0399136231

Quotes about Sontag

 * (Sorted alphabetically by author or source.)

 * Susan Sontag's perceptive, often controversial, thoughts continually challenged all those who read them, and made a hugely important contribution to recent American thought. … Susan Sontag will be remembered as a fearless thinker whose pronouncements on everything from sex to photography to language had a formative impact on not one, but four, generations.
 * "Obituary: Susan Sontag" at BBC News (28 December 2004)

 * At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge—or possibly Stalin and Malenkov. Sontag was the Supremo and I the obsequious gofer. … Most important, I became adept at clucking sympathetically at her constant kvetching: about the stupidity and philistinism of whatever local sap was paying for her lecture trip, how no one had yet appreciated the true worth of her novel The Volcano Lover, how you couldn't find a decent dry cleaner in downtown San Francisco, etc., etc.
 * Terry Castle, "Desperately Seeking Susan", London Review of Books, vol. 27, no. 6, 17 Match 2005

 * [Sontag] belongs less to the history of literature than to that of publicity. Anyone with the least intellectual pretension seemed to have heard of, if not actually read, her.
 * Joseph Epstein, in "A Very Public Intellectual", The Wall Street Journal (2 April 2011)

 * During the Vietnam War, Sontag went off to Hanoi as one of those people Lenin called "useful idiots"—that is, people who could be expected to defend Communism without any interest in investigating the brutality behind it. There she found the North Vietnamese people noble and gentle, if a touch boring and puritanical for her tastes. Doubtless that trip led to her most famous foolish remark, when she said that "the white race is the cancer of human history," later revising this judgment by noting that it was a slander on cancer.
 * Joseph Epstein, in "A Very Public Intellectual", The Wall Street Journal (2 April 2011)

 * Some might think Sontag's renunciation of communism an exception to this record of nearly perfect political foolishness. In a 1982 speech at New York's Town Hall, she announced that communism was no more than "fascism with a human face." The remark drove bien-pensants up the (still standing Berlin) wall. Others who had fallen for the dream of communism had got off the train as long as 50 years earlier. And whatever can Sontag have meant by "a human face" to describe a monstrous system of government that in Russia, Eastern Europe, China and Cambodia slaughtered scores of millions of people?
 * Joseph Epstein, in "A Very Public Intellectual", The Wall Street Journal (2 April 2011)

 * Through four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original, derivative, naïve, sophisticated, approachable, aloof, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, ambivalent, lucid, inscrutable, visceral, reasoned, chilly, effusive, relevant, passé, ambivalent, tenacious, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, cantankerous and clever. No one ever called her dull. … Ms. Sontag was a master synthesist who tackled broad, difficult and elusive subjects: the nature of art, the nature of consciousness and, above all, the nature of the modern condition. Where many American critics before her had mined the past, Ms. Sontag became an evangelist of the new, training her eye on the culture unfolding around her.
 * Margalit Fox, in "Susan Sontag, Social Critic With Verve, Dies at 71" in The New York Times (28 December 2004)

 * Unlike many politically engaged writers, Sontag never hankered after the security of a finished system of thought. If she acquired a reputation for contrarian thinking it was because she responded directly to historical events, which rarely conform to ideological stereotypes.
 * John N. Gray, "Lines of Beauty" (Review of At The Same Time) The New Statesman (23 April 2007)

 * She moved readily from references to philosophers, poets, literary theoreticians and film auteurs. Reviewers were, rightly, dazzled. Though she changed her mind repeatedly, it was always done with style and conviction. If you wanted to argue with Sontag, you had to enter into her work in terms of the way a stance, a position, made sense as an intervention.
 * Eric Homberger, in "Susan Sontag" obituary in The Guardian (29 December 2004)

 * Harold Bloom scribbled in the margin of a draft of my dissertation in 1971, "Mere Sontagisme!" It saddened me, but I knew Bloom was right. Sontag, who should have been Jane Harrison's successor as a supreme woman scholar, had become synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing.
 * Camille Paglia, "Sontag, Bloody Sontag" in Tramps and Vamps (NY:Vintage, 1994)

 * Sontag's cool exile was a disaster for the American women's movement. Only a woman of her prestige could have performed the necessary critique and debunking of the first instant-canon feminist screeds, such as those of Kate Millett or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose middlebrow mediocrity crippled women's studies from the start. No patriarchal villains held Sontag back; her failures are her own.
 * Camille Paglia, "Sontag, Bloody Sontag" in Tramps and Vamps (NY:Vintage, 1994)

 * Looking back on her own earlier writings, Susan Sontag has remarked: "Now the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, 'unrealistic,' to most people."
 * Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)

 * I will always remember my encounter with the writer and cultural icon Susan Sontag, largely because I met the great [mathematician] Benoit Mandelbrot on the same day. It took place in 2001, two months after the terrorist event of September, in a radio station in New York. Sontag, who was being interviewed, was piqued by the idea of a fellow who "studies randomness" and came to engage me. When she discovered that I was a [stock market] trader, she blurted out that she was "against the market system" and turned her back to me as I was in mid-sentence, just to humiliate me (note here that courtesy is an application of the Silver Rule), while her assistant gave me a look as if I had been convicted of child killing. I sort of justified her behavior in order to forget the incident, imagining that she lived in some rural commune, grew her own vegetables, wrote with pencil and paper, engaged in barter transactions, that type of stuff. No, she did not grow her own vegetables, it turned out. Two years later, I accidentally found her obituary (I waited a decade and a half before writing about the incident to avoid speaking ill of the departed). People in publishing were complaining about her rapacity; she had squeezed her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for what would be several million dollars today for a novel. She shared, with a girlfriend, a mansion in New York City, later sold for $28 million. Sontag probably felt that insulting people with money inducted her into some unimpeachable sainthood, exempting her from having skin in the game.
 * Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, Chapter 13: "The Merchandising of Virtue'' (Penguin, 2018)

 * (You lived in New York for over a decade. What are some of your fondest memories of that time?) LV: Incredibly enlightening friendships: Susan Sontag, Jerome Bruner
 * Luisa Valenzuela Interview (2022)

 * The theme that runs through Susan's writing is this lifelong struggle to arrive at the proper balance between the moral and the aesthetic … There was something unusually vivid about her writing. That's why even if one disagrees with it — as I did frequently — it was unusually stimulating. She showed you things you hadn't seen before; she had a way of reopening questions.
 * Leon Wieseltier, as quoted in "Susan Sontag, Social Critic With Verve, Dies at 71"  by Margalit Fox in The New York Times (28 December 2004)

 * The white race is the cancer of human history? Who was this woman? Who and what? An anthropological epidemiologist? A renowned authority on the history of cultures throughout the world, a synthesizer of the magnitude of a Max Weber, a Joachim Wach, a Sir James Frazer, an Arnold Toynbee? Actually, she was just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium, encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review. Perhaps she was exceptionally hell-bent on illustrating McLuhan's line about indignation endowing the idiot with dignity, but otherwise she was just a typical American intellectual of the post-World War II period.
 * Tom Wolfe, on Sontag's 1967 claim that "the white race is the cancer of human history," in Wolfe's essay "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists," Harper's Monthly (June 2000)

Obituaries

 * BBC
 * The Economist
 * Toronto Star
 * ''The Guardian
 * The Los Angeles Times
 * The New York Times
 * The Telegraph
 * The Times (London)
 * Slate
 * Dissent
 * Village Voice
 * The Observer
 * n+1

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Susan Sontag