Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

“Sanity is a cozy lie” lands with Sontag’s signature impatience for moral comfort. The line isn’t a plea for chaos; it’s an accusation against the social machinery that calls itself “normal.” “Cozy” does the real work: sanity isn’t framed as truth or health but as a warm, upholstered story we tell to stay unbothered by what we know, what we desire, what we fear. It implies complicity. You don’t just have sanity; you settle into it.

Sontag wrote in a postwar culture obsessed with categories that promised cleanliness: sane/insane, healthy/sick, civilized/primitive, art/obscenity. Across her essays, she interrogated the way institutions convert experience into manageable labels, and labels into permission structures. What gets called “sanity” often functions as social obedience with better PR: the ability to keep moving, keep producing, keep speaking in acceptable tones, even when the world’s brutality should make that impossible.

The subtext has a political edge. If sanity is a lie, it’s also a public service announcement: the system needs you to believe your adaptation is virtue. It flatters you for coping, then uses that coping as proof that nothing is truly wrong. In that sense, the line reads like a critique of both psychiatry-as-policing and everyday bourgeois self-management - the soothing narrative that your private equilibrium is the highest good.

Sontag’s provocation: maybe discomfort is the honest response, and “sanity” is just the name we give to forgetting.