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If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
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
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
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.
John Berger
The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
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
All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
John Berger
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
John Berger
In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
John Berger
The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
John Berger
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
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
My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.
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The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.
John Berger
Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
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
Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn't work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.
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
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
John Berger
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
John Berger
Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
John Berger
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John Berger