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 BERGERThe 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.
More John Berger Quotes
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Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
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A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
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All publicity works upon anxiety.
JOHN BERGER -
It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
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In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
JOHN BERGER -
No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGER -
The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
The zoo cannot but disappoint.
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Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
JOHN BERGER -
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
JOHN BERGER -
Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
JOHN BERGER -
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.
JOHN BERGER