The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
JOHN BERGERTo be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
More John Berger Quotes
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
JOHN BERGER -
The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
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.
JOHN BERGER -
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
JOHN BERGER -
A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
JOHN BERGER -
Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
JOHN BERGER -
Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
JOHN BERGER -
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
JOHN BERGER -
[O]ften 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.
JOHN BERGER -
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
JOHN BERGER -
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.
JOHN BERGER -
All publicity works upon anxiety.
JOHN BERGER -
Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
JOHN BERGER -
I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
JOHN BERGER -
Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
JOHN BERGER