Quotes by John Berger

John Berger

John Berger

English art critic, novelist, painter and poet

Lived from: 1926 - 2017

Category: Media Country: FlagUnited Kingdom

Born: 5 november 1926 Died: 2 january 2017

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
  • 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.
  • Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
  • One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
  • The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
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Quotes 1 till 20 of 23.

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  • 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
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  • Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
    ― John Berger
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  • 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
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  • 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.
    ― John Berger
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  • Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
    ― John Berger
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  • Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
    ― John Berger
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  • Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
    ― John Berger
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  • Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
    ― John Berger
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  • Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
    ― John Berger
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • Publicity is the life of this culture. Without publicity capitalism could not survive and at the same time publicity is its dream.
    ― John Berger
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  • 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
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  • The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
    ― John Berger
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
    ― John Berger
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  • 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
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Questions and Answers

What are the most famous quotes from John Berger?

The two most famous quotes from John Berger are:

  • "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."
  • "Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form."

When did John Berger live?

John Berger was born in 1926 and died in the year 2017.