It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
JOHN BERGERThe envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
More John Berger Quotes
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Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
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The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
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Nothing fortuitous happens in a child’s world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.
JOHN BERGER -
The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
JOHN BERGER -
The 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.
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The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
JOHN BERGER -
Landscapes 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.
JOHN BERGER -
Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.
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Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.
JOHN BERGER -
It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
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The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.
JOHN BERGER -
To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen….
JOHN BERGER -
As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.
JOHN BERGER