Quotes by

John Berger

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

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

Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why –but the editorialists forget it –terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking. – John Berger

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 and not by a but. – 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

Is boredom anything less than the sense of ones faculties slowly dying? – John Berger

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, hasnt changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman. – John Berger

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 – 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

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

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

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. – 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

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

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 its something that theatre can do, but its rare; its very rare. – 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

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