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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
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
Consequently
Leads
Relation
Present
History
Fear
Past
Mystification
Always
Constitutes
More quotes by John Berger
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
John Berger
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase it is quite literally true.
John Berger
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
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 weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
John Berger
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
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 publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
John Berger
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
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
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
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
To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
John Berger
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
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.
John Berger
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
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
It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
John Berger
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
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
