Quotes by John Berger

“Nothing fortuitous happens in a childs world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.”

“Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.”

“A mans death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.”

“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.”

“We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.”

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

“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.”

“Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom ones self to be bored.”

“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 storys voice makes everything its own.”

“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.”

“You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.”

“There is tremendous demand for this type of service. The main reason for all of this is that it will improve patient care. They get an expert whos awake during the daytime to look at those results.”

“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.”

“We came back from Labor Day, and the interest has just exploded, ... Its just going to get more and more from here unless crude just takes a bath. That doesnt look likely anytime soon.”

“Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.”