John Peter Berger Quotes

• 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 Peter Berger

• 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 Peter Berger

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

  John Peter Berger

• 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 Peter Berger

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

  John Peter Berger

• A man’s 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.

  John Peter Berger

  Topics in Death

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

  John Peter Berger

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Writing

• 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.

  John Peter Berger

• 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 Peter Berger

• 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 Peter Berger

• 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 Peter Berger

• 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 Peter Berger

• I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often 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. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

  John Peter Berger

• Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

  John Peter Berger

• Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant. This ideology is compounded from different sources: items that have survived from religion, items of empirical knowledge, items of protective skepticism, items culled for comfort from the superficial learning that is supplied. But the point is that common-sense can never teach itself, can never advance beyond its own limits, for as soon as the lack of fundamental learning has been made good, all items become questionable and the whole function of common-sense is destroyed. Common-sense can only exist as a category insofar as it can be distinguished from the spirit of inquiry, from philosophy.

  John Peter Berger

• 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 Peter Berger

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Capitalism, Culture, Publicity

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

  John Peter Berger

  Tags in Envy

• Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

  John Peter Berger

• What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.

  John Peter Berger

• One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.

  John Peter Berger

John Peter Berger (47)

Birth:	5th November, 1926
Death:	2nd January, 2017
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Critic, Essayist, Novelist, Painter, Screenwriter

About

John Peter Berger was born in London, England. He was an English art critic, novelist, painter, essayist and screenwriter. He studied at St Edward's School in Oxford, Chelsea School of Art, and the Central School of Art in London. He began his career as a painter and exhibited works at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s. He taught drawing at St Mary's teacher training college. He wrote several novels include: A Painter of Our Time, The Foot of Clive, Corker's freedom, G. (Won- Booker Prize for Fiction 1972, James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction 1972), Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag, To the Wedding, and From A to X. He wrote several essays include: Permanent Red, Toward Reality, and The Look of Things. He wrote several books (art criticism) include: Success and Failure of Picasso, Ways of Seeing, About Looking, and Keeping a Rendezvous. He wrote several films include: The Salamander, Middle of the World, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, and Play Me Something.

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