This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
JOHN BERGERA cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
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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.
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All creation is in the art of seeing.
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One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
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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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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
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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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What any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
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Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.
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At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
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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.
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By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
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(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
JOHN BERGER