People who fight may lose. People who do not fight have already lost.
BERTOLT BRECHTYoung 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?
More Bertolt Brecht Quotes
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First feed the face, then talk right and wrong.
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Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.
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The defeats and victories of the fellows at the top aren’t always defeats and victories for the fellows at the bottom.
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For art to be ‘unpolitical’ means only to ally itself with the ‘ruling’ group.
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As regards obstacles, the shortest distance between two points can be a curve.
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What a miserable thing life is: you’re in clover; only the clover isn’t good enough.
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The alienation effect in German epic theater is achieved not only through the actors, but also through music (chorus and song) andsets (transparencies, film strips, etc.). Its main purpose is to place the staged events in their historical context.
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Never believe on faith, see for yourself! What you yourself don’t learn you don’t know.
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I opened the man’s skull and messed about with his brains. I saw how they patched fellows up, so as to cart them back to the Front as quickly as they could.
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Love is also like a coconut which is good while it is fresh, but you have to spit it out when the juice is gone, what’s left tastes bitter.
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Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
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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.
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Life is short and so is money.
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Poverty makes you wise but it’s a curse.
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From the cradle to the coffin underwear comes first.
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You can’t write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen.
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We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
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Terrible is the temptation to be good.
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Even the most blockheaded bureaucrat, provided he loves peace, is a greater lover of the arts than any so-called art-lover who loves the arts of war.
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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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What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?
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There must always be some who are brighter and some who are stupider, the latter make up for it by being better workers.
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What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?
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He who fights, can lose. He who doesn’t fight, has already lost.
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Don’t accept the habitual as a natural thing. In times of disorder, of organized confusion, of de-humanized humanity, nothing should seem natural. Nothing should seem impossible to change.
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The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.
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