Top 35 John Berger Quotes

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.

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.

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

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.

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.

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

The Cro-Magnons lived with fear and amazement in a culture of Arrival, facing many mysteries. Their culture lasted for some 20,000 years.

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

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.

It has always seemed to me that those who are without power, who have to create their own in a makeshifit way, know more about life than those who govern.

As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances. 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.

In Degas’s compositions with several dancers, their steps, postures and gestures often resemble the almost geometric, formal letters of an alphabet, whereas their bodies and heads are recalcitrant, sinuous and individual.

You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

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.

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.

We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

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.

Degas was obsessed by the art of classical ballet, because to him it said something about the human condition. He was not a balletomane looking for an alternative world to escape into. Dance offered him a display in which he could find, after much searching, certain human secrets.

I think I’m very permeable. I can very easily, without even choosing to do it, enter the life of another. Or, to put it in a more modest and accurate way, for that life to enter mine.

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

Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.

Globalisation means many things. At one level, it talks of trade, which since the 16th century has exchanged goods and now, increasingly, ideas and information across the globe. But globalisation is also a view of the world – it is an opinion about man and why men are on the world.

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

The autobiographical doesn’t interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.

In drawing after drawing, pastel after pastel, painting after painting, the contours of Degas’s dancing figures become, at a certain point, darkly insistent, tangled and dusky. It may be around an elbow, a heel, an armpit, a calf muscle, the nape of a neck.

Until 1954, I’d only ever thought of being a painter, but I earned my money when and where I could. You could say I drifted into writing.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.

Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it itself risks becoming exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such.

Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite.