John Berger Quotes

The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

If we are not represented, we are slaves.

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

Men still have to be governed by deception.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.

It's easier to blame the person with less power.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

If we accept the rule of those who think they are the bosses and lords of Mexico, nothing will change for the people on the bottom.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.

Justice often means taking power from some who have it and giving it to some who do not.

Power is dangerous for those who do not have it.

Where the people possess no authority, their rights obtain little respect.

The natural course of power is to make the many slaves to the few.

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.

Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.

When you challenge other people's ideas of who or how you should be, they may try to diminish and disgrace you. It can happen in small ways in hidden places, or in big ways on a world stage. You can spend a lifetime resenting the tests, angry about the slights and the injustices. Or, you can rise above it.

Power is never so overwhelming that there's no room for resistance.

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

In a confrontation with the politics of power, the soft center has always melted away.

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.

You carry forever the fingerprint that comes from being under someone's thumb.