Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956)
Commonly known as Bertolt Brecht, was an influential German Marxist dramatist, stage director, and poet of the 20th century.
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!
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.
Spring is noticed, if at all
By people sitting in railway trains.
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.
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!
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.
A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.
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.
General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.
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.
Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.