Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
JOHN BERGERYet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.
More John Berger Quotes
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
JOHN BERGER -
A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work – related far more directly to the demands of communication.
JOHN BERGER -
The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
JOHN BERGER -
Today the discredit of words is very great.
JOHN BERGER -
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.
JOHN BERGER -
What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
JOHN BERGER -
[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
JOHN BERGER -
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
JOHN BERGER -
Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
JOHN BERGER -
A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
JOHN BERGER -
Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.
JOHN BERGER -
That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
JOHN BERGER -
These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
JOHN BERGER -
Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
JOHN BERGER -
Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
JOHN BERGER