Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
JOHN BERGERMy heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.
More John Berger Quotes
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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
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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.
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Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature
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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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Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
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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)
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Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
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Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
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It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
JOHN BERGER -
All publicity works upon anxiety.
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Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
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This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.
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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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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.
JOHN BERGER