Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
JOHN BERGERLandscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.
More John Berger Quotes
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Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
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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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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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For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
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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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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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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
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We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
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If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
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Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
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I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
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Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
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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