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Quotes by John Berger

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
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
– John Berger
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
Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
– John Berger
Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
– John Berger
Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
– 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.
– John Berger
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
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
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
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.
– 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
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
– John Berger
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
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
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
– 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.
– John Berger
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
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
– John Berger
Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
– 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.
– John Berger