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The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.
John Berger
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John Berger
Age: 90 †
Born: 1926
Born: November 5
Died: 2017
Died: January 2
Art Critic
Art Historian
Author
Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Painter
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Hackney
John Peter Berger
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More quotes by John Berger
All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
John Berger
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
John Berger
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (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
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
John Berger
The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
John Berger
Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko... all believed in the social role of art... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering music with painting poetry with design fine art with propaganda photographs with typography diagrams with action the studio with the street.
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
The envied are like bureaucrats the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
John Berger
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
The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality... could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.
John Berger
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.
John Berger
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
John Berger
To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
John Berger
Today the discredit of words is very great.
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
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
John Berger
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
John Berger
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
Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why but the editorialists forget it terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.
John Berger
