Creativity Quote by John Berger

Language as a “home” is Berger’s sly reversal of modern alienation: if the built world can be bought, policed, bombed, or made unaffordable, then the one shelter that still might belong to you is the one you can carry in your mouth. The word “potentially” is doing the honest work here. Berger isn’t sentimental about language as some automatic refuge; he’s staking a conditional claim. Language can be weaponized, flattened into propaganda, turned into bureaucratic noise. Yet even then it retains a peculiar openness: it can be re-used, re-phrased, stolen back. A landlord can change the locks; a regime can ban a book; neither can permanently prevent you from naming what you see.

The line also carries Berger’s signature political tenderness. As an artist and critic of how capitalism frames perception, he’s obsessed with where meaning lives when institutions fail. Calling language “the only human home” implies that exile is not just geographic but semantic: to be displaced is to have your world misnamed by someone else. “Cannot be hostile” reads less like a guarantee than a wager on human agency. Hostility requires an external force; language, at its best, is internal and relational - made between people, not imposed like architecture.

Context matters: Berger wrote in a century of mass displacement and mass media, when images and slogans increasingly told people who they were. Against that, he offers language as the last inhabitable space where a person can still negotiate reality, preserve memory, and quietly refuse the terms of their own erasure.