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)
JOHN BERGERThe camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
More John Berger Quotes
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
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These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
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But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
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The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
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Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
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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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In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
JOHN BERGER -
Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
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A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
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Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
JOHN BERGER -
The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
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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 opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
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Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
JOHN BERGER






