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Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

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
Naked
Nude
Beauty
Nudity
Form
Condemned
Never
Reveals
Placed
Display
Dress
Dresses
Nakedness

More quotes by John Berger

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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.
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The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
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Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion. The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
John Berger
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The 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.
John Berger
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The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
John Berger
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'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
John Berger
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society ... recognises nothing except the power to acquire ... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.
John Berger
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Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
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Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
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Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
John Berger
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When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
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We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
John Berger
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The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
John Berger
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Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
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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.
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Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
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One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
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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