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Unhappiness doesn’t grow on the chest like leprosy. Poverty won’t fall off the roof like a loose tile, no; poverty and unhappiness are man’s doing.

Bertolt Brecht

You can’t write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Tree Wood Writing
A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Acting Men People
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it’s all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It’s the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Government People War
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.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Audience Discovery Experience Joy Pleasure Schooled
First feed the face, then talk right and wrong.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Faces Firsts Talk
I was called up in the war and sent to a hospital. I dressed wounds, applied iodine, gave enemas, did blood transfusions. If the doctor ordered: “Brecht, amputate a leg!”, I would reply, “Certainly, Your Excellency!”, and cut off the leg. If I was told, “Perform a trepanning!”
BERTOLT BRECHT

Cutting Men Transfusion War
The finest plans have always been spoiled by the littleness of them that should carry them out. Even emperors can’t do it all by themselves.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Finest Spoil
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.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Condition Example Made Realist
Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Fear Today Triumph
People who understand everything get no stories.
BERTOLT BRECHT

People Stories Understand
If you don’t have fun, you don’t have a show.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Fun Inspirational Shows
Who has good luck is good, Who has bad luck is bad.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Bad Good Luck
He who speaks of enemies , himself is the enemy.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Enemy Himself Speak
Love is the wish to give, not to receive.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Giving Love Wish
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Art Mirror Reality
The headlong stream is termed violent But the river bed hemming it in is Termed violent by no one.
BERTOLT BRECHT

Bed Rivers Violent

Unhappiness doesn’t grow on the chest like leprosy. Poverty won’t fall off the roof like a loose tile, no; poverty and unhappiness are man’s doing.

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Unhappiness doesn’t grow on the chest like leprosy. Poverty won’t fall off the roof like a loose tile, no; poverty and unhappiness are man’s doing.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bertolt Brecht Quotes