Bertolt Brecht Quotes

Morality is a luxury we can't afford out here. There's no right or wrong, just survival or death.

Eats first, morals after.

In brief, egoism in its modern interpretation, is the antithesis, not of altruism, but of idealism.

The end must justify the means.

Power shifts your thinking from what is right and wrong to what is necessary

It's a survival thing. I don't do anything to be artistic or just because I like it.

What most men call their conscience is imaginary virtue switching left or right according to self-interest.

Everyone is just making the choices they think will help them get by.

It has been well said that a hungry man is more interested in four sandwiches than four freedoms.

Mankind deserves sacrifice - but not of mankind.

When we were engaged in the problems of survival we had no time to have anything to do with culture.

You have to kill to survive. People have been doing it forever. I eat meat, and I eat fish. If I were on a deserted island I would need that to survive.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

Necessity makes an honest man a knave.

They went into stores to get food to stay alive. Looting isn't the right word. I call it survival.

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

If I'm walking down the riverbank, and a man is drowning, even if I don't know how to swim very well, I feel this urge that the right thing to do is to try to save that person. Evolution would tell me exactly the opposite: preserve your DNA. Who cares about the guy who's drowning?

A conscientious man ought not to regard what may happen to him in this world.

A man's own safety is a god that sometimes makes very grim demands.

A starving man thinks first of satisfying his hunger before anything else. He will sell his liberty and all for the sake of getting a morsel of food.

Lies are dangerous but sometimes necessary when a country is in danger.

The ideologue says “whatever is right works.” The pragmatist says “whatever works is right.”

I didn't put Priest down. He was just trying to get out. His deeds weren't noble ones, but he was making money, and he had intelligence. And he did survive. I mean, all this was reality.

People always choose self-preservation over the greater good, most of the time, with the belief that self-preservation is the greater good.

Survival is important, art is secondary. If you aren't alive, how can you create art?