All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
JOHN BERGERTraditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
More John Berger Quotes
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We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.
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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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A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
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Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
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Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.
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Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
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Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
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Words 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.
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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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What 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.
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It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
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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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She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
JOHN BERGER