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.
JOHN BERGERWhat is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
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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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Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
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Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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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
JOHN BERGER -
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
JOHN BERGER -
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
JOHN BERGER -
The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
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This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.
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Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
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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.
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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.
JOHN BERGER






