Bertolt Brecht Quotes

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People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.

Bertolt Brecht
Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. 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
Show interest in her goodness, for no one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.

Bertolt Brecht
The mill wheel turns, it turns forever, though what is uppermost remains not so.

Bertolt Brecht
Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.

Bertolt Brecht
What rapture, oh, it is to know A good thing when you see it And having seen a good thing, oh, What rapture 'tis to flee it.

Bertolt Brecht
Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is at their heels.

Bertolt Brecht
One of the main reasons why the sciences are so poor is that they imagine they are so rich. It isn't their job to throw open the door to infinite wisdom but to put a limit to infinite error.
Galileo speaking

Bertolt Brecht
A good soldier has his heart and soul in it. When he receives an order, he gets a hard on, and when he drives his lance through his enemy's guts, he comes.

Bertolt Brecht
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
GALILEO: Truth is born of the times, not of authority. Our ignorance is limitless: let us lop one cubic millimeter off it. Why try to be clever now that we at last have a chance of being just a little less stupid?

Bertolt Brecht
SAGREDO [reluctant to go to the telescope]: I feel something not all that remote from fear, Galileo.
GALILEO: I'm about to show you one of the shining milkwhite clouds in the Milky Way. Tell me what it's made up of.
SAGREDO: Those are stars, innumerable stars.

Bertolt Brecht
GALILEO:...Knowledge will become a passion and research an ecstasy.

Bertolt Brecht
BELLARMIN: Wouldn't you also think it possible that the Creator had a better idea of what he was making than those he has created?

Bertolt Brecht
Love is the desire to give, not to receive, something. Love is the art of producing something with the other's talents.

Bertolt Brecht
Sin is what is new, strong, surprising, strange. The theatre must take an interest in sin if the young are to be able to go there.

Bertolt Brecht
I am a playwright. I show What I have seen. In the man markets I have seen how men are traded. That I show, I, the playwright.

Bertolt Brecht
On thinking about Hell, I gather
My brother Shelley found it was a place
Much like the city of London. I
Who live in Los Angeles and not in London
Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be
Still more like Los Angeles.

Bertolt Brecht
The more we can squeeze out of nature by inventions and discoveries and improved organization of labour, the more uncertain our existence seems to be. It's not we who lord it over things, it seems, but things which lord it over us.

Bertolt Brecht
The storm that bends the birch trees Is held to be violent But how about the storm That bends the backs of the roadworkers?

Bertolt Brecht
There are some with brains and some without. It makes for a better division of labour.

Bertolt Brecht
What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank?

Bertolt Brecht
And the shark he has his teeth and
There they are for all to see
And Macheath he has his knife but
No one knows where it may be.

Bertolt Brecht
One can describe the world of today to the people of today only if one describes it as capable of alteration.

Bertolt Brecht
It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality. 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
Those who are weak don't fight.
Those who are stronger might fight
for an hour.
Those who are stronger still might fight
for many years.
The strongest fight
their whole life.
They are the indispensable ones.

Bertolt Brecht
How long Do works endure? As long As they are not completed.

Bertolt Brecht
From the cradle to the grave, underwear first, last and all the time.

Bertolt Brecht
Mr. Wurlitzer, I am now in a position to receive your organ.

Bertolt Brecht
When the leaders speak of peace, the common folk know war is coming.

Bertolt Brecht