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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
Departure
Live
Dominant
Centuries
Progress
Century
Culture
Ceaseless
Three
Lasted
Two
More quotes by John Berger
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.
John Berger
[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. . . .
John Berger
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
John Berger
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
John Berger
The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.
John Berger
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
John Berger
'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
John Berger
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
The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
John Berger
To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
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
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
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
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
John Berger
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.
John Berger
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.
John Berger
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.
John Berger
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase it is quite literally true.
John Berger
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)
John Berger
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.
John Berger