One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
JOHN BERGERA drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work – related far more directly to the demands of communication.
More John Berger Quotes
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Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
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Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
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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.
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These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
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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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The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.
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Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.
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Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.
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The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.
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Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.
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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.
JOHN BERGER