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The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.

John Berger

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.
JOHN BERGER

Artist Communication Drawing Finished Need Only Private Public Relate Statue Work
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

Accident Anything Birth Impossible Injustice May Nothing Remain
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
JOHN BERGER

Add All Cutting Daily Future Mean Media Modernism Past Presently
Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.
JOHN BERGER

Actor Art Before Both Bring Cinema Compare Drama Dramatix Nature Public Right Season
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.
JOHN BERGER

Female Herself Object Sight Surveyed Turn Vision Woman
Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
JOHN BERGER

Continual Define Poetry Reassembking Repair Scattered Separate Space
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
JOHN BERGER

Bureaucrat Envied Envy Greater Illusion Power Themselves
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
JOHN BERGER

Achieve All Art Cinema Mankind People Save Sky Spontaneous
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

Both Case Common Hate Love Opposite Separate Something
To be naked is to be oneself.
JOHN BERGER

Be Naked Oneself
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
JOHN BERGER

Inspirational Light Material Photography Primary
The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
JOHN BERGER

Address Animal Cave Man Men Mountain Sea Secret Specifically Unlike
The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.
JOHN BERGER

Art Common Differentiate More People Power Rare Sometimes Strange Theatre Urgent
Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
JOHN BERGER

Basis Compassion Natural Necessity Operate Order Place World
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 BERGER

Animal Capacity Development First Human In Language Men Separate Signal Symbolic
Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.
JOHN BERGER

Achievement Behind Deceptive Landscape Life Seem Setting Sometimes Struggle Success

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.

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The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.

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Popular Authors

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