We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
JOHN BERGERWe know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
JOHN BERGERIt dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
JOHN BERGERThe 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 BERGERCapitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.
JOHN BERGERPublicity 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 BERGERFanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
JOHN BERGERBetween 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 BERGERWe only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
JOHN BERGERYou can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
JOHN BERGERIt is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
JOHN BERGERBut toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
JOHN BERGERThe power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
JOHN BERGERYet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
JOHN BERGERThis determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.
JOHN BERGERA man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGERTo be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
JOHN BERGER