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 BERGERNever chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
More John Berger Quotes
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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
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The zoo cannot but disappoint.
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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
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Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
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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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Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
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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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Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.
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Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
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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.
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It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
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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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Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
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The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
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The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
JOHN BERGER






