We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
JOHN BERGERBy contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
More John Berger Quotes
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You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
JOHN BERGER -
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
JOHN BERGER -
Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.
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 -
I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.
JOHN BERGER -
Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
JOHN BERGER -
Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
JOHN BERGER -
I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often 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 -
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 -
Today the discredit of words is very great.
JOHN BERGER -
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
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 -
A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
JOHN BERGER -
Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER