The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
JOHN BERGERMen look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
More John Berger Quotes
-
-
The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn’t work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.
JOHN BERGER -
Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
JOHN BERGER -
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
JOHN BERGER -
The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
JOHN BERGER -
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 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 -
By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
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 -
The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
JOHN BERGER -
When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.
JOHN BERGER -
Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
JOHN BERGER -
This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
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