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The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
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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Thinking
Rooting
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Autobiographical
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More quotes by 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
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
John Berger
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
Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
John Berger
Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
John Berger
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
John Berger
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
John Berger
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
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 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
Directors like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors precisely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except fo the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.
John Berger
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
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
John Berger
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
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
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
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase it is quite literally true.
John Berger
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
John Berger
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
John Berger
