By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
JOHN BERGERThe poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.
More John Berger Quotes
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Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
JOHN BERGER -
Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
JOHN BERGER -
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
JOHN BERGER -
No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGER -
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
JOHN BERGER -
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
JOHN BERGER -
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
JOHN BERGER -
This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
JOHN BERGER -
The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
JOHN BERGER