Hold Everything Dear Quotes

“Hold Everything Dear”
― John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

“This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody's side, in love the dark confirms that we are together.”
― John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

“But for the overcrowded, for those who have little or nothing except, sometimes, courage and love, hope works differently. Hope is then something to bite on, to put between the teeth. Don't forget this. Be a realist. With hope between the teeth comes the strength to carry on even when fatigue never lets up, comes strength, when necessary, to choose not to shout at the wrong moment, comes the strength above all not to howl. A person, with hope between her or his teeth, is a brother or sister who commands respect.”
― John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

“THE WORLD HAS changed. Information is being communicated differently. Misinformation is developing its techniques. On a world scale emigration has become the principal means of survival. The national state of those who had suffered the worst genocide in history has become, militarily speaking, fascist. National states in general have been politically downsized and reduced to the role of vassals serving the new world economic order. The visionary political vocabulary of three centuries has been garbaged. In short, the economic and military global tyranny of today has been established.”
― John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich,’ Peter Ustinov the playwright recently observed with succinct clarity. Although”
― John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

“Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the ‘freedom’ of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretences. Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, have been and are taken unilaterally without any open consultation or participation. Both”
― John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

“The precondition for thinking politically on a global scale is to see the unity of the unnecessary suffering taking place. *”
― John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

“Hold Everything Dear for John Berger as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey as the rose buds a green room to breathe and blossoms like the wind as the thinning birches whisper their silver stories of the wind to the urgent in the trucks as the leaves of the hedge store the light that the moment thought it had lost as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a wren in the turning air as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark hold everything dear the calligraphy of birds across the morning the million hands of the axe, the soft hand of the earth one step ahead of time the broken teeth of tribes and their long place steppe-scattered and together clay's small, surviving handle, the near ghost of a jug carrying itself towards us through the soil the pledge of offered arms, the single sheet that is our common walking the map of the palm held in a knot but given as a torch hold everything dear the paths they make towards us and how far we open towards them the justice of a grass that unravels palaces but shelters the songs of the searching the vessel that names the waves, the jug of this life, as it fills with the days as it sinks to become what it loves memory that grows into a shape the tree always knew as a seed the words the bread the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door the yearning to begin again together animals keen inside the parliament of the world the people in the room the people in the street the people hold everything dear 19th May 2005 Gareth Evans”
― John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

“The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.”
― John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

“Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the ‘freedom' of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretences.”
― John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

“Watching either, one knew that the world would never again be the same; the risks everywhere, to which life was heir, had been changed on the morning of a new unclouded day. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced that the United States was henceforth the supreme armed power in the world. The attack of 11 September announced that this power was no longer guaranteed invulnerability on its home ground. The two events mark the beginning and end of a certain historical period. Concerning”
― John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance