John BergerThinkers

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.

The Animal is distinguished from man by the human capacity for symbolic thought, a capacity whereby man's first symbols were animals. As such what distinguished man from animals was born of man's relationship with animals.

The Animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, and seas are specifically addressed to man.

Art is somehow able to judge the judges, plead revenge to the innocent and show the future what the past has suffered so that it has never been forgotten.

Art's strange power lies in the fact that it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them.

The Artist is a receiver rather than a creator. What seems like creation is the act of giving form to what he has received.

Autobiography is an orphan form because it necessarily begins with a sense of being alone.

Beauty makes us less alone. That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

The Camera is a device that 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.

The Camera is a device that relieves us of the burden of memory.

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.

The Child is a being for whom there are no accidents: everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.

The Cicada is the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.