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.
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.
JOHN BERGERIn the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.
JOHN BERGERHope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
JOHN BERGERCompare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.
JOHN BERGERThe human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
JOHN BERGERThe unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
JOHN BERGERPropaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
JOHN BERGERPaintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
JOHN BERGERThe relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.
JOHN BERGERNo painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGERA photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.
JOHN BERGERThe camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
JOHN BERGERThe spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
JOHN BERGERPainting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
JOHN BERGERCommon-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.
JOHN BERGERBut toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
JOHN BERGER