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.
Susan Sontag[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.
Susan SontagThe only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
Susan SontagOne man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
Susan SontagI discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
Susan Sontag