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One Of The Fundamental Reasons Why So Many Doctors Become Cynical And Disillusioned Is Precisely Because, When The Abstract Idealism Has Worn Thin, They Are Uncertain About The Value Of The Actual Lives Of The Patients They Are Treating. This Is Not Because They Are Callous Or Personally Inhuman: It Is Because They Live In And Accept A Society Which Is Incapable Of Knowing What A Human Life Is Worth.

-John Berger

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One Of The Fundamental

John Berger

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One Of The Fundamental Reasons Why So Many Doctors Become Cynical And Disillusioned Is Precisely Because, When The Abstract Idealism Has Worn Thin, They Are Uncertain About The Value Of The Actual Lives Of The Patients They Are Treating. This Is Not Because They Are Callous Or Personally Inhuman: It Is Because They Live In And Accept A Society Which Is Incapable Of Knowing What A Human Life Is Worth.

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Every Authentic Poem Contributes To The Labour Of Poetry... To Bring Together What Life Has Separated Or Violence Has Torn Apart.

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.

To Be Naked Is To Be Oneself. To Be Nude Is To Be Seen Naked By Others And Yet Not Recognised For Oneself.

Autobiography Begins With A Sense Of Being Alone. It Is An Orphan Form.

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)

What Makes Photography A Strange Invention Is That Its Primary Raw Materials Are Light And Time.

There's The Artist's Intimacy And Truthfulness To Himself, But An Equal Intimacy To The Other [the One Drawn]. Picasso Drawings Are Like That... The Rembrandts Are Like That. The Artist Who Most Often Did That Was Van Gogh.

The Publicity Image Steals Her Love Of Herself As She Is, And Offers It Back To Her For The Price Of The Product.

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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.

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.

When We Read A Story, We Inhabit It. The Covers Of The Book Are Like A Roof And Four Walls.

For The Artist, Drawing Is Discovery. And That Is Not Just A Slick Phrase; It Is Quite Literally True.

What Do Drawings Mean To Me? I Really Don't Know. The Activity Absorbs Me. I Forget Everything Else In A Way That I Don't Think Happens With Any Other Activity.

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Ever Since The Greek Tragedies, Artists Have, From Time To Time, Asked Themselves How They Might Influence Ongoing Political Events.

Your Lips, Beloved, Are Like A Honeycomb: Honey And Milk Are Under The Tongue. And The Smell Of Your Clothes Is Like The Smell Of My Home.

If The Public Photograph Contributes To A Memory, It Is To The Memory Of An Unknowable And Total Stranger.

It Can Happen That A Book, Unlike Its Authors, Grows Younger As The Years Pass.

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.

Today The Discredit Of Words Is Very Great.

I Use Charcoal A Lot. Partly Because It Has Such A Fantastic Range But Also Because It Is Very Easy To Erase. For Me, Drawing Is A Lot To Do With Taking Out, With Returning To The White Of The Paper.

I Can't Tell You What Art Does And How It Does It, But I Know That Often 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. Art, When It Functions Like This, Becomes A Meeting-place Of The Invisible, The Irreducible, The Enduring, Guts, And Honor.

The Strange Power Of Art Is Sometimes It Can Show That What People Have In Common Is More Urgent Than What Differentiates Them. It Seems To Me It's Something That Theatre Can Do, But It's Rare; It's Very Rare.

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.

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

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The Spectator-buyer Is Meant To Envy Herself As She Will Become If She Buys The Product. She Is Meant To Imagine Herself Transformed By The Product Into An Object Of Envy For Others, An Envy Which Will Then Justify Her Loving Herself.

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So Time Doesn't Count, And Place Does?' I Said This To Tease Her. When I Was A Man, I Liked Teasing Her And She Went Along With It, Consenting, For It Reminded Us Both Of A Sadness That Had Passed.

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To Remain Innocent May Also Be. To Remain Ignorant.

We Only See What We Look At. To Look Is An Act Of Choice.

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If Every Event Which Occurred Could Be Given A Name, There Would Be No Need For Stories.

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The Extreme Proposition On Which Giacometti Based All His Mature Work Was That No Reality... Could Ever Be Shared. This Is Why He Believed It Impossible For A Work To Be Finished. This Is Why The Content Of Any Work Is Not The Nature Of The Figure Or Head Portrayed But The Incomplete History Of Him Staring At It.

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A Photograph Is A Meeting Place Where The Interests Of The Photographer, The Photographed, The Viewer And Those Who Are Using The Photograph Are Often Contradictory. These Contradictions Both Hide And Increase The Natural Ambiguity Of The Photographic Image.

Those Who First Invented And Then Named The Constellations Were Storytellers. Tracing An Imaginary Line Between A Cluster Of Stars Gave Them An Image And An Identity. The Stars Threaded On That Line Were Like Events Threaded On A Narrative. Imagining The Constellations Did Not Of Course Change The Stars, Nor Did It Change The Black Emptiness That Surrounds Them. What It Changed Was The Way People Read The Night Sky.

Photography, Because It Stops The Flow Of Life, Is Always Flirting With Death.

The Relation Between What We See And What We Know Is Never Settled. Each Evening We See The Sun Set. We Know That The Earth Is Turning Away From It. Yet The Knowledge, The Explanation, Never Quite Fits The Sight.

The Autobiographical Doesn't Interest Me. I Could Think Of Few Things Less Interesting Than Rooting About In My Life.

When We Suffer Anguish We Return To Early Childhood Because That Is The Period In Which We First Learnt To Suffer The Experience Of Total Loss. It Was More Than That. It Was The Period In Which We Suffered More Total Losses Than In All The Rest Of Our Life Put Together.

The Opposite Of Love Is Not To Hate But To Separate. If Love And Hate Have Something In Common It Is Because, In Both Cases, Their Energy Is That Of Bringing And Holding Together

The Zoo Cannot But Disappoint.

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.

All Photographs Are There To Remind Us Of What We Forget. In This - As In Other Ways - They Are The Opposite Of Paintings. Paintings Record What The Painter Remembers. Because Each One Of Us Forgets Different Things, A Photo More Than A Painting May Change Its Meaning According To Who Is Looking At It.

Never Again Shall A Single Story Be Told As Though It Were The Only One.

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A Drawing Is An Autobiographical Record Of One's Discovery Of An Event - Either Seen, Remembered Or Imagined. A 'finished' Work Is An Attempt To Construct An Event In Itself.

Propaganda Requires A Permanent Network Of Communication So That It Can Systematically Stifle Reflection With Emotive Or Utopian Slogans. Its Pace Is Usually Fast.

Every City Has A Sex And An Age Which Have Nothing To Do With Demography. Rome Is Feminine. So Is Odessa. London Is A Teenager, An Urchin, And, In This, Hasn't Changed Since The Time Of Dickens. Paris, I Believe, Is A Man In His Twenties In Love With An Older Woman.

Hope Is A Contraband Passed From Hand To Hand And Story To Story.

It Is Not Usually Possible In A Poem Or A Story To Make The Relationship Between Particular And Universal Fully Explicit. Those Who Try To Do So End Up Writing Parables.

Men Look At Women. Women Watch Themselves Being Looked At.

All Creation Is In The Art Of Seeing.

Every City Has A Sex And Age Which Have Nothing To Do With Demography.

Drawing Is A Way Of Coming Upon The Connection Between Things, Just Like Metaphor In Poetry Reconnects What Has Become Separated.

Emigration, Forced Or Chosen, Across National Frontiers Or From Village To Metropolis, Is The Quintessential Experience Of Our Time.

Never Chain Your Dogs Together With Sausages. One Must Accustom One's Self To Be Bored.

It Is Seeing Which Establishes Our Place In The Surrounding World; We Explain That World With Words, But Words Can Never Undo The Fact That We Are Surrounded By It

We Can Become Anything. That Is Why Injustice Is Impossible Here. There May Be The Accident Of Birth, There Is No Accident Of Death. Nothing Forces Us To Remain What We Were.

Men Look At Women. Women Watch Themselves Being Looked At. This Determines Not Only Most Relations Between Men And Women But Also The Relation Of Women To Themselves. The Surveyor Of Woman In Herself Is Male: The Surveyed Female. Thus She Turns Herself Into An Object - And Most Particularly An Object Of Vision: A Sight.

[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. . . .

A Cigarette Is A Breathing Space. It Makes A Parenthesis. The Time Of A Cigarette Is A Parenthesis, And If It Is Shared, You Are Both In That Parenthesis. Its Like A Proscenium Arch For A Dialogue.

Breathing Space

The Essence Of Songs Is Neither Vocal Nor Cerebral But Organic. We Follow Songs In Order To Be Enclosed. We Find Ourselves Inside A Message. The Unsung, Impersonal World Remains Outside, On The Other Surface Of A Placenta. All Songs, Even When Their Content Or Rendering Is Strongly Masculine, Operate Maternally.

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.

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.

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.

To Live And Die Amongst Foreigners May Seem Less Absurd Than To Live Persecuted Or Tortured By One's Fellow Countrymen.... But Toemigrate Is Always To Dismantle The Centre Of The World, And So To Move Into A Lost, Disoriented One Of Fragments.

Glamour Cannot Exist Without Personal Social Envy Being A Common And Widespread Emotion.

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.

History Always Constitutes The Relation Between A Present And Its Past. Consequently Fear Of The Present Leads To Mystification Of The Past

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.

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.

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.

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