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
Topics: Critics, Criticism
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
—John Berger
Topics: Envy
I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
—John Berger
Topics: Art
The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature
—John Berger
Topics: Pleasure
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.
—John Berger
Topics: Television
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
Topics: Evil
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger
Topics: The Past, Past
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
Topics: Oppression, Travel
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity—their links with their dead and the unborn.
—John Berger
Topics: Nationality, Nationalities, Nation, Nationalism
Hope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.
—John Berger
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this—as in other ways—they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
—John Berger
Topics: Photography
Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.
—John Berger
Topics: Audiences, Actors
At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
—John Berger
Topics: Perfection
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one’s faculties slowly dying?
—John Berger
Topics: Bores, Boredom
Animals are born, are sentient and are mortal. In these things they resemble man. In their superficial anatomy — less in their deep anatomy — in their habits, in their time, in their physical capacities, they differ from man. They are both like and unlike.
—John Berger
Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant. This ideology is compounded from different sources: items that have survived from religion, items of empirical knowledge, items of protective skepticism, items culled for comfort from the superficial learning that is supplied. But the point is that common-sense can never teach itself, can never advance beyond its own limits, for as soon as the lack of fundamental learning has been made good, all items become questionable and the whole function of common-sense is destroyed. Common-sense can only exist as a category insofar as it can be distinguished from the spirit of inquiry, from philosophy.
—John Berger
Topics: Common Sense
If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listen. For me, a storyteller is like a passeur who gets contraband across a frontier.
—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
Topics: Time Management, Time
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.
—John Berger
Topics: Reading, Books
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
—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 it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.
—John Berger
Topics: Art
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
Topics: Language
The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
—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
Topics: Photography, Memory
A man’s death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.
—John Berger
Topics: Dying, Death
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
Topics: Culture, Capitalism
The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
—John Berger
Topics: Love
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
Topics: Advertising
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
Topics: Photography
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
Topics: Words
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Ford Madox Ford English Novelist, Poet, Critic
- Raymond Chandler American Novelist
- Stephen Fry English Actor, Writer
- John Fowles English Novelist
- Peter Ustinov British Actor, Playwright
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti British Poet, Artist
- Bryan Forbes English Actor, Film Director
- Robert Ranke Graves British Writer
- Nick Hornby English Author
- Anthony Burgess English Novelist, Critic
Leave a Reply