History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
JOHN BERGERFor those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
More John Berger Quotes
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Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.
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The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
JOHN BERGER -
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
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Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
JOHN BERGER -
For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
JOHN BERGER -
Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
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Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
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By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
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Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
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You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
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A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.
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We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
JOHN BERGER