Quote

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

John Berger

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Horizon
Disappear
Travel
Close
Century
Seeing
Helplessly
Others
Enforced
People
Disappearance

More quotes by John Berger

Image
[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. . . .
John Berger
Image
The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
John Berger
Image
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
John Berger
Image
In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
John Berger
Image
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
John Berger
Image
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.
John Berger
Image
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase it is quite literally true.
John Berger
Image
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
John Berger
Image
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.
John Berger
Image
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
John Berger
Image
Directors like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors precisely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except fo the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.
John Berger
Image
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
John Berger
Image
Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
John Berger
Image
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.
John Berger
Image
The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
John Berger
Image
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
John Berger
Image
Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
John Berger
Image
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.
John Berger
Image
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.
John Berger
Image
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