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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.
John Berger -
You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
John Berger
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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
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 -
The human quality Degas most admired was endurance.
John Berger -
It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
John Berger -
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
John Berger -
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
John Berger
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It has always seemed to me that those who are without power, who have to create their own in a makeshifit way, know more about life than those who govern.
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 -
I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
John Berger -
Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
John Berger -
As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances. A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
John Berger -
Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.
John Berger
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Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
John Berger -
Perspective is not a science but a hope.
John Berger -
Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it itself risks becoming exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such.
John Berger -
In drawing after drawing, pastel after pastel, painting after painting, the contours of Degas's dancing figures become, at a certain point, darkly insistent, tangled and dusky. It may be around an elbow, a heel, an armpit, a calf muscle, the nape of a neck.
John Berger -
Hope is not a form of guarantee; it's a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.
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
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In ethics, there is a humility; moralists are usually righteous.
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 -
Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
John Berger -
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
John Berger