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John Berger Quotes | Quotes said by John Berger

  • John Berger Quote #1

    A boycott is directed against a policy and the institutions which support that policy either actively or tacitly. Its aim is not to reject, but to bring about change.


  • John Berger Quote #2

    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 Quote #3

    A drawing of a tree shows not a tree but a tree being looked at

  • John Berger Quote #4

    A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.

  • John Berger Quote #5

    A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

    One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. 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 Quote #6

    Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

  • John Berger Quote #7

    Being a unique superpower undermines the military intelligence of strategy. To think strategically, one has to imagine oneself in the enemy's place. If one cannot do this, it is impossible to foresee, to take by surprise, to outflank. Misinterpreting an enemy can lead to defeat. This is how empires fall.

  • John Berger Quote #8

    Both agreed that to find any sense in life it was pointless to search in the places where people were instructed to look. Sense was only to be found in secrets.

  • John Berger Quote #9

    But for the overcrowded, for those who have little or nothing except, sometimes, courage and love, hope works differently. Hope is then something to bite on, to put between the teeth. Don't forget this. Be a realist. With hope between the teeth comes the strength to carry on even when fatigue never lets up, comes strength, when necessary, to choose not to shout at the wrong moment, comes the strength above all not to howl. A person, with hope between her or his teeth, is a brother or sister who commands respect.

  • John Berger Quote #10

    Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

  • John Berger Quote #11

    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 Quote #12

    Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

  • John Berger Quote #13

    Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.

  • John Berger Quote #14

    Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, an encounter. Most encounters, however, have a sequel; this is their promise. The encounter with happiness has no sequel. All is there instantly. Happiness is what pierces grief.

  • John Berger Quote #15

    History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

  • John Berger Quote #16

    If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

  • John Berger Quote #17

    Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?

  • John Berger Quote #18

    My heart born naked
    was swaddled in lullabies.
    Later alone it wore
    poems for clothes.
    Like a shirt
    I carried on my back
    the poetry I had read.

    So I lived for half a century
    until wordlessly we met.

    From my shirt on the back of the chair
    I learn tonight
    how many years
    of learning by heart
    I waited for you.

  • John Berger Quote #19

    Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

  • John Berger Quote #20

    Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.

    Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

  • John Berger Quote #21

    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 Quote #22

    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 Quote #23

    Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.

  • John Berger Quote #24

    That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

  • John Berger Quote #25

    The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

  • John Berger Quote #26

    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. 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. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.

  • John Berger Quote #27

    The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

  • John Berger Quote #28

    The industrial society... recognises nothing except the power to acquire... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.

  • John Berger Quote #29

    The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.

  • John Berger Quote #30

    The point about hope is that it is something that occurs in very dark moments. It is like a flame in the darkness; it isn't like a confidence and a promise.

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