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 BERGERWhen 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.
More John Berger Quotes
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Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
JOHN BERGER -
What do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.
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 -
It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
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 -
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
JOHN BERGER -
Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGER -
What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.
JOHN BERGER -
Nothing fortuitous happens in a child’s world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.
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 -
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 -
It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
JOHN BERGER -
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
JOHN BERGER -
Today the discredit of words is very great.
JOHN BERGER -
Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
JOHN BERGER