John Berger

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it itself risks becoming exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such.”

“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.”

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

“When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions.”

“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.”

“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.”

“The human quality Degas most admired was endurance.”

“A boycott is directed against a policy and the institutions which support that policy either actively or tacitly. Its aim is not to reject, but to bring about change.”

“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.”

“Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.”

“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.”

“Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.”

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”

“The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester's motley coloured costume turned his usually melancholy expression in to a joke. The clown is used to loss. Loss is his prologue.”

“The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.”

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