John Berger

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John Peter Berger (born November 5, 1926) is an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. The best-known among his many works include the novel G., winner of the 1972 Booker Prize, and the introductory essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a significant BBC series of the same name, and often used as a college text. Born in Highams Park, London, England, Berger attended St Edward's School in Oxford. "His father, S.J.D. Berger, O.B.E., M.C., had been an infantry officer on the western front during the First World War". Berger served in the British Army from 1944 to 1946; he then enrolled in the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art in London. "Berger began his career as a painter and exhibited work at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s." "His art has been exhibited at the Wildenstein, Redfern and Leicester galleries in London. Berger has continued to paint throughout his career." While teaching drawing (from 1948 to... full article at wikipedia

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  • Nov 5, 1926
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Quotations
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
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.
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.
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.
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
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.
Publicity is the life of this culture. Without publicity capitalism could not survive and at the same time publicity is its dream.
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Pig Earth
  • 0394512685
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Topic History

Metaweb
Created by Metaweb Oct 23, 2006
quotationsbook
Last edited by quotationsbook Jul 2, 2008

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