John Berger Quotes

One must denounce the economic, financial, and social mechanisms and structures that are manipulated by the rich and powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the poor

The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.

Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It's more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.

What we call Monopoly is Business at the end of its journey. The concentration of wealth, the wiping out of the middle classes, are other names for it. To get it is, in the world of affairs, the chief end of man.

The Left’s essential mental instrument is class analysis, according to which society is best understood in terms of the competing interests of aggregate groups.

The First Law of Class Warfare: Once inequalities develop, the upper classes can, with relative ease, drastically reduce the probability of success for any equalizing challenges to the system.

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

When great wealth collects the way it has in the last two decades, it develops an arrogance…. You see it in the development of a survival of the fittest philosophy, one that says markets are more important than democracy.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital.

Capitalism is very undemocratic. Capitalism gives you power according to your wealth while democracy gives you power according to your existence.

We cannot rebuild the American Dream here at home by catering to the voices of the privileged and powerful.

Some members of the ruling class are making a concerted effort to expand the wealth gap.

In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.

The only way to gain the kinds of often-generational wealth that the 1% has been able to gain is through controlling the populations it relied on to make its wealth.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.

Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

The wealthy have installed their slaves in the highest spheres of the state. The banks are privately owned. They are concerned solely with profits. They have no interest in the common good.

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

Men who are scandalized at the lack of freedom in Russia do not ask themselves how real is liberty among the poor, the weak, and the ignorant in capitalist society.