John Berger Quotes

A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
John Berger

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger

Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
John Berger

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
John Berger

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
John Berger

Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
John Berger

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
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

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
John Berger

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.
John Berger

Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.
John Berger

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.
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

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 past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
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

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

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
John Berger

Rudolf Arnheim Quotes

A system is in equilibrium when the forces constituting it are arranged in such a way as to compensate each other, like the two weights pulling at the arms of a pair of scales.
Rudolf Arnheim

All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.
Rudolf Arnheim

As one gets older, it happens that in the morning one fails to remember the airplane trip to be taken in a few hours or the lecture scheduled for the afternoon.
Rudolf Arnheim

At one of the annual conventions of the American Society for Aesthetics much confusion arose when the Society for Anesthetics met at the same time in the same hotel.
Rudolf Arnheim

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.
Rudolf Arnheim

Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.
Rudolf Arnheim

Furthermore, order is a necessary condition for making a structure function. A physical mechanism, be it a team of laborers, the body of an animal, or a machine, can work only if it is in physical order.
Rudolf Arnheim

Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.
Rudolf Arnheim

In a land of immigrants, one was not an alien but simply the latest arrival.
Rudolf Arnheim

In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses.
Rudolf Arnheim

Man's striving for order, of which art is but one manifestation, derives from a similar universal tendency throughout the organic world; it is also paralleled by, and perhaps derived from, the striving towards the state of simplest structure in physical systems.
Rudolf Arnheim

Modem science, then, maintains on the one hand that nature, both organic and inorganic, strives towards a state of order and that man's actions are governed by the same tendency.
Rudolf Arnheim

Now equilibrium is the very opposite of disorder.
Rudolf Arnheim

Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand.
Rudolf Arnheim

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.
Rudolf Arnheim

The absurd consequences of neglecting structure but using the concept of order just the same are evident if one examines the present terminology of information theory.
Rudolf Arnheim

The arts, as a reflection of human existence at its highest, have always and spontaneously lived up to this demand of plenitude. No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple.
Rudolf Arnheim

The clarification of visual forms and their organization in integrated patterns as well as the attribution of such forms to suitable objects is one of the most effective training grounds of the young mind.
Rudolf Arnheim

The foreign accent was a promise, and indeed, all over the country, European imports added spice to the sciences, the arts, and other areas. What one had to give was not considered inferior to what one received.
Rudolf Arnheim

The least touchable object in the world is the eye.
Rudolf Arnheim