Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
JOHN BERGERThe power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
More John Berger Quotes
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Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
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Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
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Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.
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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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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
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Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
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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.
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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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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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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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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
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The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
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In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.
JOHN BERGER