John Berger Quotes
Top 83 wise famous quotes and sayings by John Berger
John Berger Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from John Berger on Wise Famous Quotes.
The precondition for thinking politically on a global scale is to see the unity of the unnecessary suffering taking place. *
What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.
The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection
the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel.
the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel.
A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn't the truth either. It's more like a fleeting, subjective impression.
Until 1954, I'd only ever thought of being a painter, but I earned my money when and where I could. You could say I drifted into writing.
Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.
The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronize the urban poor it is naming. That is power.
Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.
Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.
To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
The promise is that again and again from the garbage the scattered feathers the ashes and broken bodies something new and beautiful may be born
Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance there is judgment.
Publicity is in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future... According to publicity, to be sophisticated is to live beyond conflict.
Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.
We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
The silence after a felled tree has fallen is like the silence immediately after a death. The same sense of culmination.
Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.
The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
Hope is not a form of guarantee; it's a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.
'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
I have never thought of writing as a profession. It is a solitary independent activity in which practice can never bestow seniority.
The Cro-Magnons lived with fear and amazement in a culture of Arrival, facing many mysteries. Their culture lasted for some 20,000 years.