To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one's fellow countrymen.... But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one… — John Berger Copy Share Image
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… — John Berger Copy Share Image
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. — John Berger Copy Share Image
The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter… — John Berger Copy Share Image
Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything… — John Berger Copy Share Image
Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which… — John Berger Copy Share Image
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries. — John Berger Copy Share Image
My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the… — John Berger Copy Share Image
There's the artist's intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn]. Picasso drawings are like that... the… — John Berger Copy Share Image
Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature… — John Berger Copy Share Image
Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one. — John Berger Copy Share Image
In drawing after drawing, pastel after pastel, painting after painting, the contours of Degas's dancing figures become, at a certain point, darkly insistent, tangled… — John Berger Copy Share Image
We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. — John Berger Copy Share Image
We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death.… — John Berger Copy Share Image