Top 150 John Berger Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.”

— John Berger

103. “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.”

— John Berger

104. “Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich,’ Peter Ustinov the playwright recently observed with succinct clarity. Although.”

— John Berger

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “Both agreed that to find any sense in life it was pointless to search in the places where people were instructed to look. Sense was only to be found in secrets.”

— John Berger

109. “The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.”

— John Berger

110. “This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody’s side, in love the dark confirms that we are together.”

— John Berger

111. “Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.”

— John Berger

112. “It is a mistake to think of publicity supplanting the visual art of post-Renaissance Europe; it is the last moribund form of that art.”

— John Berger

113. “The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.”

— John Berger

114. “Just after the Second World War Picasso bought a house in the South of France and paid for it with one still-life. Picasso has now in fact transcended the need for money. Whatever he wishes to own, he can acquire by drawing it. The truth has become a little like the fable of Midas.”

— John Berger

115. “Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion.”

— John Berger

116. “Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.”

— John Berger

117. “She was now the center of what surrounded her. All that was not her made space for her.”

— John Berger

118. “Today the discredit of words is very great.”

— John Berger

119. “Publicity has another social function. The fact that this function has not been planned as a purpose by those make and use publicity in no way lessens its significance. Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy.”

— John Berger

120. “The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection – the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel.”

— John Berger

121. “We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.”

— John Berger

122. “The garden is a kind of sanctuary.”

— John Berger

123. “The promise is that again and again from the garbage the scattered feathers the ashes and broken bodies something new and beautiful may be born.”

— John Berger

124. “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. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which as beggar is a reminder of nothing.”

— John Berger

125. “The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.”

— John Berger

126. “Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, an encounter. Most encounters, however, have a sequel; this is their promise. The encounter with happiness has no sequel. All is there instantly. Happiness is what pierces grief.”

— John Berger

127. “What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.”

— John Berger

128. “The gap between what publicity actually offers and the future it promises, corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be. The two gaps become one; and instead of the single gap being bridged by action or lived experience, it is filled with glamorous daydreams.”

— John Berger

129. “Accept the unknown. There are no secondary characters. Each one is silhouetted against the sky. All have the same stature. Within a given story some simply occupy more space.”

— John Berger

130. “Having seen this reproduction, one can go to the National Gallery to look at the original and discover what the reproduction lacks. Alternatively one can forget about the quality of the reproduction and simply be reminded, when one sees the original, that it is a famous painting of which somewhere one has already seen a reproduction. But in either case the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction.”

— John Berger

131. “We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless ‘thing’ and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the ‘thing’ which is waiting to be articulated.”

— John Berger

132. “Their space has absolutely nothing in common with that of a stage. When experts pretend that they can see here ‘the beginnings of perspective’, they are falling into a deep, anachronistic trap. Pictorial systems of perspective are architectural and urban – depending upon the window and the door. Nomadic ‘perspective’ is about coexistence, not about distance.”

— John Berger

133. “If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.”

— John Berger

134. “There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronize the urban poor it is naming. That is power.”

— John Berger

135. “A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature’s home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.”

— John Berger

136. “We have no word for this darkness. It is not night and it is not ignorance. From time to time we all cross this darkness, seeing everything: so much everything that we can distinguish nothing. You know it, Marisa, better than I. It’s the interior from which everything came.”

— John Berger

137. “Lace is a kind of white writing which you can only read when there’s skin behind it.”

— John Berger

138. “Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsomely indifferent.”

— John Berger

139. “It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.”

— John Berger

140. “Like an artist, or like anybody else who believes that his work justifies his life, Sassall – by our society’s miserable standards – is a fortunate man.”

— John Berger

141. “The small family living unit lacks space, Earth, other animals, seasons, natural temperatures, and so on. The pet is either sterilized or sexually isolated, extremely limited in his exercise, deprived of almost all other animal contact, and fed with artificial foods. This is the material process which lies behind the truism the pets come to resemble their masters or mistresses. They are creatures of their owners way of life.”

— John Berger

142. “The autobiographical doesn’t interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.”

— John Berger

143. “To become bored with eating is to be bored with life.”

— John Berger

144. “The canvas is on the easel now, as large and white as a sheet that has never been slept in. My paintings have become larger and larger as I have grown older. As a young painter you are overwhelmed by the complexity of your subject. Every crease, every dimple, is an equally startling revelation. It’s like your first girl. You don’t understand her. You can only copy her – hesitantly. Later you become shamelessly yourself. You create in your image – as nearly life-size as possible.”

— John Berger

145. “Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. This is true even in the most casual family snapshot. The photographer’s way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject.”

— John Berger

146. “Preachers love only their own voices.”

— John Berger

147. “The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless.”

— John Berger

148. “Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.”

— John Berger

149. “You were like no man I had ever heard of. You could have made whatever you liked of me. But you did nothing. A woman isn’t like money that put in a bank and it will bring you interest without you doing anything about it. A woman is a person.”

— John Berger

150. “Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.”

— John Berger