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We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

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
Two
Lasted
Live
Departure
Dominant
Centuries
Progress
Century
Culture
Three
Ceaseless

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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.
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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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Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
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Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase it is quite literally true.
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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.
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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 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.
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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
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History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
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We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
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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.
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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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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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