Joshie Berger Quotes

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them. ~ John Berger

Hold Everything Dear ~ John Berger

In contrast to the notion that any publicity is good publicity, negative reviews hurt sales for some books. But for books by new or relatively unknown authors, negative reviews increased sales by 45%.... Even a bad review or negative word of mouth can increase sales if it informs or reminds people that the product or idea exists. ~ Jonah Berger

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. ~ 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

It has been said that when people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate one another. We look to others for information about what is right or good to do in a given situation, and this social proof shapes everything from the products we buy to the candidates we vote for. The phrase 'Monkey see, monkey do' captures more than just our tendency to follow others. If people can't see what others are doing, they can't imitate them. So to get our products and ideas to become popular we need to make them more publicly observable ~ Jonah Berger

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

The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man. ~ John Berger

Desire changes its character by 180 degrees. Often, when first aroused, it is felt as the desire to have. The desire to touch is, partly, the desire to lay hands on, to take. Later, transformed, the same desire becomes the desire to be taken, to lose oneself within the desired. From these two opposed moments come one of the dialectics of desire; both moments apply to both sexes and they oscillate. Clearly the second moment, the desire to lose oneself within, is the most abandoned, the most desperate, and it is the one that Caravaggio chose (or was compelled) to reveal in many of his paintings. ~ John Berger

I remember the embarrassment I felt when Lie With Me came out over ten years ago. There was no good way for me to explain why I shot fiction with pornography, hoping for the best. That initial public embarrassment was likely a kind of useless repression. Because I had no big truth to tell about myself. Now, though, in retrospect, I know why I wrote Lie With Me. It was to sustain this perfect, merciless feeling I first had while spitting art's extremity into the suckhole of porn. And it's not embarrassing for me to admit anymore that I was desperate to find meaning in this action.

Unfortunately, by the end of two books I didn't know any more about female sexuality than when I'd started out. My mercilessness had not blossomed into compassion either.

Is untapped sexual energy in women even still a problem these days? In 1999, I felt that problem as acutely as my shame. And it was this push-pull of pressures that made me transcribe and complicate the getting-fucked female voice - a voice that I found in porn, a voice that was utterly wasted by porn.

Porn needed fiction, I felt. I needed the fight. ~ Tamara Faith Berger

I actually think of myself as quite a shy person, although I know I give the impression of someone much more confident. I think what I do have is a capacity to listen to the other, even if the other is an opponent. That leads, in all senses of the word, to an engagement. ~ John Berger

Praxis is about applying one's knowledge to challenge oppressive systems and unequal traditions. It is related to the well-known phrase "the personal is political" espoused by many advocates of the second-wave women's movement. ~ Michele Tracy Berger

Luck, is the planning you don't see. ~ Alex Berger

Religion is the human attitude towards a sacred order that includes within it all being-human or otherwise-i.e., belief in a cosmos, the meaning of which both includes and transcends man. ~ Peter L. Berger

In Degas's compositions with several dancers, their steps, postures and gestures often resemble the almost geometric, formal letters of an alphabet, whereas their bodies and heads are recalcitrant, sinuous and individual. ~ John Berger

We like to think that we think for ourselves, but it is not that simple. We think like the people we most admire and need. Everyone belongs to a community that reinforces the plausibility of some beliefs and discourages others. Berger notes that many have concluded from this fact that, because we are all locked into our historical and cultural locations, it is impossible to judge the rightness or wrongness of competing beliefs. ~ Timothy Keller

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. ~ John Berger

The photographic moment for Cartier-Bresson is an instant, a fraction of a second, and he stalks that instant as though it were a wild animal. The photographic moment for Strand is a biographical or historic moment, whose duration is ideally measured not by seconds but by its relation to a lifetime. Strand does not pursue an instant, but encourages a moment to arise as one might encourage a story to be told. ~ John Berger

You got to knock a man down and put your knife at his throat before he'll hear you, like I did to that trooper. The truth seems hateful to most everybody. ~ Thomas Berger

The electroencephalogram represents a continuous curve with continuous oscillations in which ... one can distinguish larger first order waves with an average duration of 90 milliseconds and smaller second order waves of an average duration of 35 milliseconds. ~ Hans Berger

Designers can show us a better future, can present us with all kinds of new possibilities so that we can decide: Is this what we want? Before any of that can happen, though, the designer must first commit - by taking what is just a faint glimmer in the mind's eye and giving it shape and life. ~ Warren Berger

Time is the bastard offspring of an incestuous act that God committed upon reality." Merlin to Arthur in "Arthur Rex ~ Thomas Berger

The truth is always made up of little particulars which sound ridiculous when repeated. ~ Thomas 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

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated. ~ John Berger

The sociology of knowledge has taught us to recognize the fact, which is obvious once it is stated, that in every human society there is what Peter Berger calls a "plausibility structure," a structure of assumptions and practices which determine what beliefs are plausible and what are not. It is easier to see the working of the plausibility structure in a culture of a different time or place than it is to recognize it in one's own. ~ Lesslie Newbigin

The single word that counted on Wednesday was the one that came from the muzzle of a gun, addressed to somebody on their knees. Better to choose our hour than to accept this. We know each other. We've known each other from the time of Crocodilopolis. [Letter unsent] ~ John Berger

It is finally only the fiend who doth truly worship God, as the felon adores the hangman, for the one is defined by the other. ~ Thomas Berger

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying. ~ John Berger

The main premise of appreciative inquiry is that positive questions, focusing on strengths and assets, tend to yield more effective results than negative questions focusing on problems or deficits. ~ Warren Berger

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out. ~ John Berger

It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more.
This more, it proposes,will make us in some way richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money.
Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour. (P. 125) ~ John Berger

I propose a conspiracy of orphans. We exchange winks. We reject hierarchies. All hierarchies. We take the shit of the world for granted and we exchange stories about how we nevertheless get by. We are impertinent. More than half the stars in the universe are orphan-stars belonging to no constellation. And they give off more light than all the constellation stars. ~ John Berger

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. ~ John Berger

If word-of-mouth pundits agree on anything, it's that being interesting is essential if you want people to talk. Most buzz marketing books will tell you that. So will social media gurus. "Nobody talks about boring companies, boring products, or boring ads," argues one prominent word-of-mouth advocate. Unfortunately, he's wrong. ~ Jonah Berger

The point about hope is that it is something that occurs in very dark moments. It is like a flame in the darkness; it isn't like a confidence and a promise. ~ John Berger

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. ~ John Berger

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. ~ John Berger

It is amazing how quickly the kids learn to drive a car, yet are unable to understand the lawn mower, snowblower and vacuum cleaner. ~ Ben Berger

Institutions provide procedures through which human conduct is patterned, compelled to go, in grooves deemed desirable by society. And this trick is performed by making these grooves appear to the individual as the only possible ones. ~ Peter L. Berger

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened. ~ Peter L. Berger

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983. ~ Sandy Berger

When I was about 18, I started to think that I could have a long sporting career. ~ Tora Berger

What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss. ~ John Berger

All publicity works upon anxiety. The sum of everything is money, to get money is to overcome anxiety. Alternatively the anxiety on which publicity plays is the fear that having nothing you will be nothing. ~ John Berger