Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.
JOHN BERGERWords 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.
More John Berger Quotes
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No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
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Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
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It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
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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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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen….
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Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
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It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.
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Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.
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(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
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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 century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.
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The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.
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The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.
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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.
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It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
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What 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.
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Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
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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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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
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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.
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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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As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.
JOHN BERGER