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 BERGERI wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
More John Berger Quotes
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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 -
Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.
JOHN BERGER -
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
JOHN BERGER -
All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
JOHN BERGER -
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
JOHN BERGER -
The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.
JOHN BERGER -
Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
JOHN BERGER -
For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
JOHN BERGER -
The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
JOHN BERGER -
My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.
JOHN BERGER -
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
JOHN BERGER -
Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
JOHN BERGER -
But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
JOHN BERGER






