John Berger quotes - page 2

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. (John Berger)
Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing. View quote
John Berger
All publicity works upon anxiety. View quote
John Berger
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. View quote
John Berger
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue. View quote
John Berger
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 a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. View quote
John Berger
When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate. View quote
John Berger
I was scared of one thing after another. I still am. Naturally. How could it be otherwise? You can either be fearless or you can be free, you can't be both. View quote
John Berger
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries. View quote
John Berger
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 course of a single life would lead us to believe. View quote
John Berger
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true. (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. View quote
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. View quote
John Berger
Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument. View quote
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. View quote
John Berger
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all. View quote
John Berger
Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story. View quote
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. View quote
John Berger
Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events. View quote
John Berger
A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself. View quote
John Berger
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated. (John Berger)
Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace. For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances. View quote
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. View quote
John Berger
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. View quote
John Berger
Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established. View quote
John Berger