Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
JOHN BERGERWhat 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.
More John Berger Quotes
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As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.
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Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.
JOHN BERGER -
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
JOHN BERGER -
It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.
JOHN BERGER -
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
JOHN BERGER -
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
JOHN BERGER -
For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
JOHN BERGER -
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
JOHN BERGER -
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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Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.
JOHN BERGER -
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






