John Berger Quotes

127 quotes in 1842 categories

• You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
• Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
• Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
• Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
• 'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
• Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
• For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
• Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
• Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
• The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of…
• What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
• 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…
• 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…
• Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity…
• 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…
• That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the…
• 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…
• Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
• Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
• The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

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