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

John Berger

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John Berger
Age: 90 †
Born: 1926
Born: November 5
Died: 2017
Died: January 2
Art Critic
Art Historian
Author
Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Painter
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Hackney
John Peter Berger
Home
Human
Potentially
Humans
Dwelling
Men
Hostile
Language
House
Place
Cannot

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We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
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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.
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Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
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'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
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When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
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A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
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The envied are like bureaucrats the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
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We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
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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 story's voice makes everything its own.
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The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
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My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.
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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.
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Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko... all believed in the social role of art... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering music with painting poetry with design fine art with propaganda photographs with typography diagrams with action the studio with the street.
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All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.
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