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 BERGERTraditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
More John Berger Quotes
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The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
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We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
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Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
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Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
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I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.
JOHN BERGER -
For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
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Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
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Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
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That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
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Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.
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Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER






