John Berger Quotes

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

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.

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

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

When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.

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.

Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.

I actually think of myself as quite a shy person, although I know I give the impression of someone much more confident. I think what I do have is a capacity to listen to the other, even if the other is an opponent. That leads, in all senses of the word, to an engagement.

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.

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

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.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

The human quality Degas most admired was endurance.

Hope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ is astounding. Not so much as a film – although it is cunning and moving – but as an event.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.