The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
JOHN BERGERYou can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
More John Berger Quotes
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Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
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History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
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A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
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Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
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Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
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The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
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If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
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Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.
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[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.
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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
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To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
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Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
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I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often 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.
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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
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Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
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Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.
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It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
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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.
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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
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When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.
JOHN BERGER