A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGERWhat distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves.
More John Berger Quotes
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Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
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Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
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Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
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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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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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We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
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One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
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Nothing fortuitous happens in a child’s world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.
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Today the discredit of words is very great.
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The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
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The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.
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To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
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All creation is in the art of seeing.
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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.
JOHN BERGER