Quotes from John Berger

I remember having the same sensation in Gordon Avenue. The two moments, instead of being separated by decades, belong to the same hour of the same season. I wipe and close the knife. A kind of vertigo overcomes me. Words make no more sense. Everything is a continuum.

Günümüzde her yanda bol miktarda imge var. Daha önce hiç bu kadar çok ÅŸey incelenip seyredilmemiÅŸti. Her an, gezegenin ya da ay?n öte yüzünde nesnelerin nas?l göründüÄŸüne bir göz atabiliyoruz. Görüntüler ÅŸimÅŸek h?z?yla kaydedilip aktar?l?yor." sayfa 26

Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.

Truths are not constantly evident in the circumstances to which they refer. They are born - sometimes late. This truth was born with the struggles and wars of national libration. In the light of the newborn truth, the significance of imperialism changed. Its demands were seen to be different. Previously it had demanded cheap raw materials, exploited labour and a controlled world market. Today it demands a mankind that counts for nothing.

It was sunny, with the special light of an autumn afternoon, when everything casts such dark and long shadows that the earth, and all that was standing on it, looked as if it was slipping towards the sun.

Seven birisi için sevgiliyi görmenin hiçbir sözcük ya da kucaklay??la kar??laÅŸt?r?lamayacak bir bütünlüÄŸü vard?r; bu bütünlük geçici olarak, ancak seviÅŸmeyle saÄŸlanabilir.

? m?s? gyvenim? ?eina tiek kit? gyvenim?, kad j? nesuskai?iuosi.

Po motin? mirties laikas dažnai padvigubina arba padidina greit?.

Seeing comes before words. A child looks and recognises before it can speak

To try to understand the experience of another it is necessary to dismantle the world as seen from one's own place within it, and to reassemble it as seen from his.

Animals are born, are sentient and are mortal. In these things they resemble man. In their superficial anatomy — less in their deep anatomy — in their habits, in their time, in their physical capacities, they differ from man. They are both like and unlike.

A]nimals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.

The truth is that most photographs taken of people are about suffering, and most of that suffering is man-made.

Clouds gather visibility, and then disperse into invisibility. All appearances are of the nature of clouds.

Never again will a single story be told as though it"s the only one.

It has nothing to do with rank. Men like them never have power. They're riders. Much later the Americans turned the rider into a cowboy, but he's much older than America. He's the man in folktales who comes to take you away on his horse. Not to his palace; he doesn't have one. He lives in a tent in the forest. He's never learnt to count— If he sells clothes in a street market, I'd have thought he could count! Prices, yes, consequences, no.

bir kitap yazmak isterim bazen yaln?z zamanla ilgili bir kitap zaman?n nas?l da olmay???, gelecek ve geçmiÅŸin nas?l da sürekli bir ÅŸu an oluÅŸuyla ilgili. düÅŸünürüm ki herkes - yaÅŸayan yaÅŸam?? ve yaÅŸayacak olan herkes- canl?d?r ÅŸimdi. bu meseleyi didik didik etmek isterim tüfeÄŸini boÅŸaltan bir asker gibi.

Sayg?n bir yaÅŸam ve ölüm için, kavramlar kendi adlar?yla an?lmal?d?r.

Yet when an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions about art. Assumptions concerning: Beauty Truth Genius Civilization Form Status Taste, etc.

El modo esencial de ver a las mujeres, el uso esencial al que se destinaban sus imágenes no ha cambiado. Las mujeres son representadas de un modo completamente distinto a los hombres, y no porque lo femenino sea distinto a lo masculino, sino porque siempre se supone que el espectador ideal es varón y la imagen de la mujer está destina a adularle.

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. (Page 40)

Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place.

Everything in life, is a question of drawing a line, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You can't 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.

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.