For once you must try not to shirk the facts: mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.
BERTOLT BRECHTWhen crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.
More Bertolt Brecht Quotes
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People cannot remain good unless good is expected of them.
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Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer.
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General, man is very useful. He can fly and he can kill. But he has one defect: He can think.
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First the pork chops, then morality
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I Who live in Los Angeles and not in London Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be Still more like Los Angeles.
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One must live well to know what living is.
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Who fights may lose, but who does not fight has lost already.
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Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties.
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Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.
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For art to be ‘unpolitical’ means only to ally itself with the ‘ruling’ group.
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Terrible is the temptation to be good.
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You can’t write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen.
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Our audience must experience not only the ways to free Prometheus, but be schooled in the very desire to free him. Theater must teach all the pleasures and joys of discovery, all the feelings of triumph associated with liberation.
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From the cradle to the coffin underwear comes first.
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A man who sees another man on the street corner with only a stump for an arm will be so shocked the first time he’ll give him sixpence. But the second time it’ll only be a three penny bit. And if he sees him a third time, he’ll have him cold-bloodedly handed over to the police.
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It isn’t important to come out on top, what matters is to be the one who comes out alive.
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Great sport begins at a point where it has ceased to be healthy.
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Life is short and so is money.
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Of all the works of man I like best Those which have been used. The copper pots with their dents and flattened edges The knives and forks whose wooden handles Have been worn away by many hands: such forms Seemed to me the noblest.
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Young Alexander conquered India. He alone? Caesar beat the Gauls. Was there not even a cook in his army? Philip of Spain wept as his fleet was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears? Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War. Who Triumphed with him?
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The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn When teachers themselves are taught to learn.
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Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
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Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women.
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For what’s the use of talking with a man who has a disease and thinks about the stars?
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Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be simpler, If the government simply dissolved the people And elected another?
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I don’t trust him. We’re friends.
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