Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956)
Commonly known as Bertolt Brecht, was an influential German Marxist dramatist, stage director, and poet of the 20th century.
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.
General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.
General, your tank
is a powerful vehicle
it smashes down forests
and crushes a hundred men.
but it has one defect:
it needs a driver.
A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.
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.
And when she was finished they laid her in earth
Flowers growing, butterflies juggling over her...
She, so light, barely pressed the earth down
How much pain it took to make her as light as that!
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.
You don't need to pray to God any more when there are storms in the sky, but you do have to be insured.
Worship with fulness of heart the weak memory of heaven!
It cannot trace
Either your name or your face
Nobody knows you're still living.
Do not treat me in this fashion. Don't leave me out. Have I not
Always spoken the truth in my books? And now
You treat me like a liar! I order you:
Burn me!
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.
Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
Sometimes I have visions of myself driving through hell, selling sulphur and brimstone, or through heaven peddling refreshments to the roaming souls. If me and the children I've got left could find a place where there's no shooting, I wouldn't mind a few years of peace and quiet.
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set some limit on infinite error.
Play your part creatively in all the struggles
Of men of your time, thereby
Helping, with the seriousness of study and the cheerfulness of knowledge
To turn the struggle into common experience and
Justice into a passion.
Oh why do we not say the important things, it would be so easy, and we are damned because we do not.
Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women. The latter normally concerns itself with profit, the former with pleasure. In the coming age, art will fashion our entertainment out of new means of productivity in ways that will simultaneously enhance our profit and maximize our pleasure.
Every day, to earn my daily bread
I go to the market where lies are bought
Hopefully
I take up my place among the sellers.
Little changes are the enemies of great changes.
With drooping shoulders
The majority sit hunched, their foreheads furrowed like
Stony ground that has been repeatedly ploughed-up to no purpose.
The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.
And I always thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough. When I say what things are like
Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.
That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself
Surely you see that.