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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.

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
Lives
Apart
Achieves
Art
Discover
Bourgeoisie
Film
Saved
Princes
Might
Sky
Continuity
People
Mankind
Spontaneous
Single
Belongs
Achieve
Cinema
Vagrant
Learn
Popular
Vagrants

More quotes by John Berger

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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.
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Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
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We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
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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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Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
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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.
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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.
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[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. . . .
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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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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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A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.
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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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Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
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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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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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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 true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
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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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