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. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which as beggar is a reminder of nothing.

— John Berger

The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who can app|y it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialists?

— John Berger

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

— John Berger

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.

— John Berger

The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.

— John Berger

This seems to me absolutely one of the quintessential things about the human condition. It’s what actually distinguishes man from any other animal: living with those who have lived and the companionship of those who are no longer alive. Not necessarily the people that one knew personally, I mean the people perhaps whom one only knows by what they did, or what they left behind, this question of the company of the past, that’s what interests me, and archives are a kind of site in the sense of like an archaeological site.

— John Berger

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

— John Berger

Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why /but the editorialists forget it /terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.

— John Berger

We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless 'thing' and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the 'thing' which is waiting to be articulated.

— John Berger

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

— John Berger