Berger Quotes & Sayings

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image. — John Berger

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

There's always challenges to everything. — Howard Berger

'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event. — John Berger

For the last eight years, American policy toward Iraq has been based on the direct threat Saddam poses to international security. That threat is clear. Saddam's history of aggression leaves little doubt that he would resume his drive for regional domination and his quest for weapons of mass destruction if he had the chance. — Sandy Berger

We see the puppets dancing on their miniature stage, moving up and down as the strings pull them around, following the prescribed course of their various little parts. We learn to understand the logic of this theater and we find ourselves in its motions. We locate ourselves in society and thus recognize our own position as we hang from its subtle strings. For a moment we see ourselves as puppets indeed. But then we grasp a decisive difference between the puppet theater and our own drama. Unlike the puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step toward freedom. And in this same act we find the conclusive justification of sociology as a humanistic discipline — Peter Berger

Advertising also plays a role. Consumers need to know about something before they can buy it. So — Jonah Berger

nearby New York or distant Beijing, but whenever I was in town, I'd call to say I was on my way. Each time I'd arrive, she'd already have covered half the dining room table with the kind of items I only seemed to consume with her. They were a reflection of her more traditional fare from the old world - hard-boiled eggs, pickled cucumbers, herring in brine, black bread and cream cheese. We'd supplement this with ethnic staples — Leon Berger

Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors. Put differently, any such typification is an institution.21 What must be stressed is the reciprocity of institutional typifications and the typicality of not only the actions but also the actors in institutions. The typifications of habitualized actions that constitute institutions are always shared ones. They are available to all the members of the particular social group in question, and the institution itself typifies individual actors as well as individual actions. — Peter L. Berger

The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality ... could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it. — John Berger

Hold Everything Dear — John Berger

To be located in society means to be at the intersection point of specific social forces. Commonly one ignores these forces one also knows that there is not an awful lot that one can do about this. — Peter L. Berger

This extravagant dwelling, as domineering as it was distant, brought home to me the intimateconnection between tyranny and abstraction, and put me in mind of John Berger's observation that "abstraction's capacity to ignore what is real is undoubtedly where most evil begins." — Michael Jackson

I think that it's a space that there are a lot of projections onto - the soon-to-be sexualized and already-sexualized young woman. There are so many outside perceptions grafted onto her, that she feels all at once completely blank and completely full. I noticed that a lot in your book, as well, this repetition of a shallowness. But there is also depth in the constant repetition of this shallowness. — Tamara Faith Berger

[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten ... — John Berger

Perspective is not a science but a hope. — John Berger

But although quality, price, and advertising contribute to products and ideas being successful, they don't explain the whole story. — Jonah Berger

When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate — John Berger

In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither product utopian trash. — John Berger

Connecting with others is rewarding; it makes us feel like we're not alone in the world. — Jonah Berger

Nobody talks about boring companies, boring products, or boring ads," argues one prominent word-of-mouth advocate. — Jonah Berger

At the beach, college girls lay in groups on the sand around buckets of drinks, their bums curved up like fruits. Mine didn't do that. — Tamara Faith Berger

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there. — Thomas Berger

Flight attendants all over the world saw 'Sex and the City.' Doesn't matter what country you are in. The flight attendants know Jack Berger. — Ron Livingston

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

As Peter Berger has noted, the strategy of apologizing for Christian faith by trying to demonstrate its social utility is always eventually self-liquidating. Sooner of later people realize that a great many of the supposedly practical and secular benefits of the Christian religion can be had more easily without religion ... The logic of practical atheism may well be more deeply ingrained in the evangelical tradition than conservatives perhaps have realized. — Craig M. Gay

Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing. — John Berger

Warren Berger's book is a cure for a disease in large enterprises. A More Beautiful Question provides a framework to help leaders ask the most important questions - which is one of the most fundamental characteristics of a great leader - while sharing inspiring stories to show the incredible power of this concept. — Jim Stengel

If we're born to inquire, then why must it be taught? — Warren Berger

It was dusk when I drove back into downtown Detroit. I was annoyed by how much traffic there was at that hour of the day. Being a guy with two good legs who doesn't mind ankling, I hadn't realized the car situation had gotten so bad in the city. I almost had two smack-ups with people who refused to yield to me. Then I bumped someone from behind, intentionally, at the new flashing traffic light on Jefferson. The guy in the car had refused to move - he just sat there waiting because the light was red. After I bumped him (not that hard), the squirt hopped out of his car red in the face, and I must admit the sight of him gave me my first laugh in two days. He said, "Can't you see it's a red light?" I told him a red light is just a suggestion. Then I pressed the gas lightly and started pushing his car further out into the intersection whilst he stood there in disbelief. "Better get back in, your car is leaving without you," I said. — W.K. Berger

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

Religion is no longer considered the source of serious truth claims that could potentially conflict with public agendas. The private realm has been reduced to an "innocuous 'play area'", says Peter Berger, where religion is acceptable for people who need that kind of crutch- but where it won't upset any important applecarts in the larger world of politics and economics. — Nancy Pearcey

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth. — John Berger

In contrast to the notion that any publicity is good publicity, negative reviews hurt sales for some books. But for books by new or relatively unknown authors, negative reviews increased sales by 45%.... Even a bad review or negative word of mouth can increase sales if it informs or reminds people that the product or idea exists. — Jonah Berger

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

The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house. Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre. — John Berger

The single word that counted on Wednesday was the one that came from the muzzle of a gun, addressed to somebody on their knees. Better to choose our hour than to accept this. We know each other. We've known each other from the time of Crocodilopolis. [Letter unsent] — John Berger

Although all new talkers say names, use similar sounds, and prefer nouns more
than other parts of speech, the ratio of nouns to verbs and adjectives varies
from place to place (Waxman et al., 2013). For example, by 18 months, Englishspeaking infants speak far more nouns than verbs compared to Chinese or Korean
infants. Why?
One explanation goes back to the language itself. The Chinese and Korean
languages are "verb-friendly" in that verbs are placed at the beginning or end of
sentences. That facilitates learning. By contrast, English verbs occur anywhere in
a sentence, and their forms change in illogical ways (e.g., go, gone, will go, went).
This irregularity may make English verbs harder to learn, although the fact that
English verbs often have distinctive suffixes (-ing, -ed) and helper words (was, did,
had) may make it easier (Waxman et al., 2013). — Kathleen Stassen Berger

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. — John Berger

At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism. — John Berger

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. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which as beggar is a reminder of nothing. — John Berger

Why do some products, ideas, and behaviors succeed when others fail? — Jonah Berger

If you are good for nothing else, you can still serve as a bad example. — Peter L. Berger

Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner. — John Berger

A beautiful question shifts the way we think about something and often sets in motion a process than can result in change. Entrepreneurs-o r at least the successful ones-do a great job asking beautiful questions. They almost have no choice -their whole reason for being is to disrupt, innovate, solve a problem no one else is solving. — Warren Berger

In Germany I am not so famous. — Hans Berger

Every project has its own challenges and rewards. If it's not challenging, why do it? — Howard Berger

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

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. 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

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

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. — John Berger

One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism. — Peter L. Berger

Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home. — John Berger

In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state. — Peter L. Berger

In all advanced industrial societies, education has become the single most important vehicle of upward mobility. — Peter L. Berger

What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss. — John Berger

Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration of some small corner of the social world that may appear quite trivial to others, so be it: Why do more teenagers pick their noses in rural Minnesota than in rural Iowa? What are the patterns of church socials over a twenty-year period in small-town Saskatchewan? What is the correlation between religious affiliation and accident-proneness among elderly Hungarians? — Peter Berger

The Cubists' belief in progress was by no means complacent. They saw the new products, the new inventions, the new forms of energy, as weapons with which to demolish the old order. Yet at the same time their interest was profound and not simply declamatory. In this they differed fundamentally from the Futurists. The Futurists saw the machine as a savage god with which they identified themselves. Ideologically they were precursors of fascism: artistically they produced a vulgar form of animated naturalism, which was itself only a gloss on what had already been done in films. 35 Carlo Carra. The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli. 1911 The Cubists felt their way, picture by picture, towards a new synthesis which, in terms of painting, was the philosophical equivalent of the revolution that was taking place in scientific thinking: a revolution which was also dependent on the new materials and the new means of production. — John Berger

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences. — John Berger

A drawing is a translation. That is to say each mark on the paper is consciously realted, not only to the real or imagined "model", but also to every mark and space already set out on the paper. Thus a drawn or painted image is woven together by the energy (or the lassitude, wen the drawing is weak) of countless judgements [sic]. Every time a figuration is evoked in a drawing, everything about it has been mediated by consciousness, either intuitively or systematically. — John Berger

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. — John Berger

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. 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

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

The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time. — John Berger

We know Saddam Hussein possesses chemical weapons - he has for nearly 20 years as we know only so well from his use of them against his own people and the Iranians. He has deadly stockpiles of biological weapons. — Sandy Berger

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 Berger

The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection
the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel. — John Berger

Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story. — John Berger

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. — John Berger

We have an education and business culture that tends to reward quick factual answers over imaginative inquiry. Questioning isn't encouraged - it is barely tolerated. — Warren Berger

In science, as in love, a concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence. — Peter L. Berger

We still have time to back out, I guess, if we want to. I don't see the karmic police coming to take us into existential custody, y'know? — David Berger

It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby. — John Berger

Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsomely indifferent. — John Berger

Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy. — Peter L. Berger

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

You dream that you want to be a monster maker when you grow up, and that's what happened. I refused to take no for an answer. I just was a very driven kid, who's now a very driven semi-adult. — Howard Berger

We welcome into our homes the machines that vacuum the thoughts out of our heads and pump in someone else's. John Berger in Ways of Seeing said that television advertisers succeeded by persuading viewers to envy themselves as they would be if they bought the product. These programmes do something similar, by persuading the viewer to envy himself as he would be if his life were that little bit more exciting and melodramatic than it actually is. They can make things seem normal that are not. — Peter Hitchens

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. 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

My mother kept calling me out of myself. She wanted to show me a picture, the first picture from the slave-ship exhibition. 'This is unbelievable,' she said. 'Myra, you have to see this, this is unbelievable.' I cringed at how fast she was talking. Why unbelievable? This all actually happened! Why is this all so hard to believe? — Tamara Faith Berger

There's been a deliberate and systematic effort to convey to countries around the world, friends and foes, that if they cross the United States there's a price to pay. — Sandy Berger

All creation is in the art of seeing. — John Berger

Landscapes can be deceptive. 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 takes place. For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal — John Berger

I started to practise shooting more seriously, more than once a week. I wasn't very good at it before, but I got a lot better. I've also become a little bit stronger on the tracks, too, which has increased my chances of success. — Tora Berger

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

Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them. — John Berger

People don't need to be paid to be motivated. — Jonah Berger

F. A. Hayek is probably the most prominent advocate of capitalism in the present period. — Peter L. Berger

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. — John Berger

True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal. One reads and rereads the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them to reach, to touch, the vision or experience that prompted them. One then gathers up what one has found there and takes this quivering almost wordless "thing" and places it behind the language it needs to be translated into. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the "thing" that is waiting to be articulated. — John Berger

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death. — John Berger

I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I'm in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse's mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one moment after another in the most complex combinations.
Freed from the boundaries of time and space. I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you. - Dziga Vertov 1923 — John Berger

Yet science articles, like Denise Grady's piece about the cough, made the Most E-Mailed list more than politics, fashion, or business news. Why? It turns out that science articles frequently chronicle innovations and discoveries that evoke a particular emotion in readers. That emotion? Awe. — Jonah Berger

Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko ... all believed in the social role of art ... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering; music with painting; poetry with design; fine art with propaganda; photographs with typography; diagrams with action; the studio with the street ... — John Berger

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. It's like a proscenium arch for a dialogue. — John Berger

Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You cant 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. — John Berger

We need to design products and ideas that are frequently triggered by the environment and create new triggers by linking our products and ideas to prevalent cues in that environment. Top of mind leads to tip of tongue. — Jonah Berger

The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude. — Peter L. Berger

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. — John Berger

The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance. — Peter L. Berger