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.
JOHN BERGERMen look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
More John Berger Quotes
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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 -
The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.
JOHN BERGER -
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
JOHN BERGER -
Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
JOHN BERGER -
Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
JOHN BERGER -
We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
JOHN BERGER -
The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
JOHN BERGER -
Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
JOHN BERGER -
No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGER -
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
JOHN BERGER -
Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
JOHN BERGER -
(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
JOHN BERGER -
Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
JOHN BERGER






