Bertolt Brecht Quotes
Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.
Brecht, Bertolt. The Mother. Translated by Lee Baxandall, Grove Press, 1965, p. 55.
This quote is often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln. It has not been found in any of his writings. The use of a chiasmus (a rhetorical device reversing word order in successive clauses) is very uncharacteristic of Abraham Lincoln's speech or writing. Quote Investigator (QI) credits {Edward J. Stieglitz} as the originator (although its possible his advertising copywriter was the source).
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a lifelong collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the so-called V-effect.
