Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag’s line flatters you and needles you in the same breath. By calling intelligence “a kind of taste,” she yanks it out of the sterile realm of IQ charts and credentialism and drops it into the messy world of preference, cultivation, and snobbery. Taste is learned; it’s social; it can be refined or corrupted. It’s also performative. The subtext is that what we call “being smart” often looks less like raw processing power and more like an aesthetic stance: which thinkers you reach for, which questions you find worth asking, which complexities you can tolerate without demanding a tidy moral.

“Taste in ideas” is a quiet attack on the notion of intellect as neutral or purely merit-based. It suggests that intelligence includes judgment: an ability to discriminate between stale concepts and live ones, between fashionable takes and fertile frameworks. That’s why the phrasing works: it’s deceptively simple, but it reframes the entire conversation. If intelligence is taste, then stupidity isn’t just ignorance; it’s bad selection, a clinging to blunt or kitschy ideas because they’re comforting, tribal, or easy to repeat.

Context matters: Sontag built a career on arguing that our cultural life is shaped by sensibility as much as argument, and she was famously suspicious of moralizing that substitutes for attention. The line also exposes the class-coded reality of “smartness.” Taste can be gatekeeping. Sontag doesn’t fully absolve that; she weaponizes it. Intelligence, she implies, is not only what you know, but the caliber of what you desire to think with.