Top 100 John Berger Quotes
#1. This extravagant dwelling, as domineering as it was distant, brought home to me the intimateconnection between tyranny and abstraction, and put me in mind of John Berger's observation that "abstraction's capacity to ignore what is real is undoubtedly where most evil begins."
Michael Jackson
#2. 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.
John Berger
#3. Anybody who passes more than a day in eternity is as old as God could ever be.
John Berger
#4. The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
John Berger
#5. Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
John Berger
#6. A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
John Berger
#7. Just after the Second World War Picasso bought a house in the South of France and paid for it with one still-life. Picasso has now in fact transcended the need for money. Whatever he wishes to own, he can acquire by drawing it. The truth has become a little like the fable of Midas.
John Berger
#8. Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
John Berger
#9. 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.
John Berger
#10. Never again will a single story be told as though its the only one.
John Berger
#11. Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
John Berger
#12. Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.
John Berger
#13. To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
John Berger
#14. The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
John Berger
#15. 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.
John Berger
#16. Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.
John Berger
#17. I actually think of myself as quite a shy person, although I know I give the impression of someone much more confident. I think what I do have is a capacity to listen to the other, even if the other is an opponent. That leads, in all senses of the word, to an engagement.
John Berger
#18. The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
John Berger
#19. At some point when tending someone you love who is in pain, you reach the edge of a lake, and you look at each other with such joy at the stillness. [Letter unsent]
John Berger
#20. The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.
John Berger
#21. I've learnt something more. The expectation of a body can last as long as any hope. Like mine expecting yours. As soon as they gave you two life sentences, I stopped believing in their time.
John Berger
#22. The industrial society ... recognises nothing except the power to acquire ... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.
John Berger
#23. Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
#24. Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
John Berger
#25. When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate
John Berger
#26. In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
John Berger
#27. 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.
John Berger
#28. There's the artist's intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn]. Picasso drawings are like that ... the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
John Berger
#29. 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.
John Berger
#30. Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
John Berger
#31. Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident
John Berger
#32. 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.
John Berger
#34. The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
John Berger
#35. Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
John Berger
#36. A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence ... defines what can and cannot be done to her.
John Berger
#37. Accept the unknown. There are no secondary characters. Each one is silhouetted against the sky. All have the same stature. Within a given story some simply occupy more space.
John Berger
#38. A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.
John Berger
#39. A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.
John Berger
#40. That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
John Berger
#41. There is a symbiotic desire to get closer and closer, to enter the self of what is being drawn, and, simultaneously, there is the foreknowledge of immanent distance. Such drawings aspire to be both a secret rendezvous and an au revoir! Alternately and ad infinitum.
John Berger
#42. The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
John Berger
#43. Degas was obsessed by the art of classical ballet, because to him it said something about the human condition. He was not a balletomane looking for an alternative world to escape into. Dance offered him a display in which he could find, after much searching, certain human secrets.
John Berger
#44. Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
John Berger
#46. Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry ... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart ... Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
John Berger
#48. We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.
John Berger
#49. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John Berger
#50. All its dimensions with their projected geometries are those of an unrealisible dream.
John Berger
#51. 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
#52. Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite.
John Berger
#53. Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
John Berger
#54. Both agreed that to find any sense in life it was pointless to search in the places where people were instructed to look. Sense was only to be found in secrets.
John Berger
#55. The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
John Berger
#56. [O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten ...
John Berger
#57. Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, an encounter. Most encounters, however, have a sequel; this is their promise. The encounter with happiness has no sequel. All is there instantly. Happiness is what pierces grief.
John Berger
#59. A boycott is directed against a policy and the institutions which support that policy either actively or tacitly. Its aim is not to reject, but to bring about change.
John Berger
#60. Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner.
John Berger
#61. Men watch. Women watch themselves being watched.
John Berger
#62. Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion. The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
John Berger
#63. The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.
John Berger
#64. 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.
John Berger
#65. To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
John Berger
#66. If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
John Berger
#67. What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
John Berger
#68. 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.
John Berger
#69. They can't foresee what we intend to do next. This is why they lose their nerve. They can't cross the zone of silence they herd us into. A zone bordered on their side by the distant din of their false accusations, and on our side by our silent final intentions.
John Berger
#70. The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
John Berger
#71. Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
John Berger
#72. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
John Berger
#73. I very seldom read back into what I've written.
John Berger
#74. You put something down and you don't know immediately what it is. It has always been like that ... All you have to know is whether you're lying or whether you're telling the truth, you can't afford to make a mistake about that distinction any longer.
John Berger
#75. The Cro-Magnons lived with fear and amazement in a culture of Arrival, facing many mysteries. Their culture lasted for some 20,000 years.
John Berger
#76. Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
John Berger
#77. The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
John Berger
#78. When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
John Berger
#79. What do drawings mean to me? I really don't know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don't think happens with any other activity.
John Berger
#80. I think I'm very permeable. I can very easily, without even choosing to do it, enter the life of another. Or, to put it in a more modest and accurate way, for that life to enter mine.
John Berger
#81. When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
John Berger
#82. 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
#83. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
John Berger
#84. To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
John Berger
#85. At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
John Berger
#86. I was scared of one thing after another. I still am.
Naturally. How could it be otherwise? You can either be fearless or you can be free, you can't be both.
John Berger
#87. What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
John Berger
#88. Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
John Berger
#89. 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
John Berger
#90. Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
John Berger
#92. We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
John Berger
#93. Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.
John Berger
#94. To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one's fellow countrymen ... But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
John Berger
#95. Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
John Berger
#96. Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
John Berger
#97. Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
John Berger
#98. 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
John Berger
#99. One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
John Berger
#100. Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
John Berger
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