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 BERGERThe heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
More John Berger Quotes
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By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
JOHN BERGER -
The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.
JOHN BERGER -
The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.
JOHN BERGER -
Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
JOHN BERGER -
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
JOHN BERGER -
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
JOHN BERGER -
These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
JOHN BERGER -
Today the discredit of words is very great.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
JOHN BERGER -
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
JOHN BERGER -
The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
JOHN BERGER -
Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
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 -
Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
JOHN BERGER -
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
JOHN BERGER -
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
JOHN BERGER -
You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
JOHN BERGER -
Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
JOHN BERGER -
No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGER