John Berger Quotes

If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

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.

If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.

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.

All publicity works upon anxiety.

I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase. For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.

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.

Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.

Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

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

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.

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.

'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.

The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.

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.

The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.

We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

So time doesn't count, and place does?' I said this to tease her. When I was a man, I liked teasing her and she went along with it, consenting, for it reminded us both of a sadness that had passed.

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

[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. . . .

To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.

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 envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.

Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.

The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

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.

The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester's motley coloured costume turned his usually melancholy expression in to a joke. The clown is used to loss. Loss is his prologue.

Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.

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

Preachers love only their own voices.

A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.

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.

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 specialtsts?

Perspective is not a science but a hope.

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. It's like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.

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.

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.