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 BERGEROne of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.
More John Berger Quotes
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Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
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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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A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
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We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
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A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
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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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The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
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Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
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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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Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
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Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
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Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
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Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
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We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
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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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We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
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A 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.
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Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
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The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
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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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It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
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The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
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To be naked is to be oneself.
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I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
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You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn’t work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.
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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
JOHN BERGER