John Berger Quotes

They import and they consume reality.

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.

I'm not sure Riot Grrrl would have been as big a deal if the Internet had existed back then. Because there's so much stuff on the Internet. People could have been like, oh, whatever, I'm going to go look at pictures of Barbie vaginas, you know what I mean? There's so many different things on the Internet, you read one article and then you read something linked off that article and you go down the rabbit hole.

In Africa, there is much confusion.... Before, there was no radio, or other forms of communication.... Now, in Africa ... the government talks, people talk, the police talk, the people don't know anymore. They aren't free.

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.

Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away.

You've got to deal with how photographs look, what's there, not how they're made.

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

The mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.

I know for sure that nothing matters.

Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.

Now, after so many years, I understand what the Coldness was and where it came from—this sense that everything is lost, and worthless, and meaningless.

The point is there ain't no point.

The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.

I think what's dangerous is 24 hours a day, 335 channels, or whatever the hell there is. Too much is too much.

For me, the photography, in its purest form, is a variant of the fable. Another way of saving the appearances - a way of signifying, through this fabulous capture, that this supposed real world is always about to lose its meaning and its reality.

One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloids and movies take the place of mental processes and revolts, crimes, despairs pass off in a dribble of vague words and rubber stamp phrases without leaving a scratch on the mind of the driven instalment-paying, subway-packing mass.

Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.

I just think there's more paparazzi, there's more cable TV, there's millions of networks now, there's more paparazzi. People liked gossip then, and they like gossip now.

Here comes Monseiur Le Beau. Rosalind: With his mouth full of news. Celia: Which he will put on us, as pigeons feed their young. Rosalind: Then shall we be news-crammed. Celia: All the better; we shall be the more marketable.

We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.