Bertolt Brecht Quotes

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

To look upon the massacre of our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, and if we speak we are called savages ….

We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witnessed, and then we move on to the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity.

When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it's again not people who are intrinsically evil.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.

There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide.

I'm sorry, those pictures from the Abu Ghraib. At first, they, like infuriated me, I was sad. Then like, a couple days later, after they cut the guy's head off, they didn't seem like much. And now, I like to trade them with my friends.

To me, Columbine is just as awful as Vietnam, and it's just as awful as anything else.

My mind revolts and my soul cannot support the weight of so much evil: theft, rape, pillage, deaths, and murders, fires and devastation; the virgin violated, the cry of the widow and the orphan; the father armed against his son and each one looking for his brother to kill him; of those who have migrated; of the thousands who have fled; of the bodies stretched out in the public streets; of the bones which cover the fields and of so much blood shed on Venezuela’s soil.

History is a bath of blood.

In order to endure death and horror one tends to kill ones own humanity, which is a much greater danger than not being able to bear it.

You are the President of this country. Come to Dhaka, come and see how our poor Bengali people have been mown down by your bullets, how the laps of our mothers and sisters have been robbed and left empty and bereft, how my helpless people have been slaughtered. Come, I said, come and see for yourself and then be the judge and decide

Another Armenian Holocaust

Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.

mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?

In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?

There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the childlike cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence. Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we are still alive.

I couldn't stop bawling, watching the towers come down. it was a terrible thing to happen. And a terrible thing to realize that I don't sit though the nigh crying when such horrors happen all the time.

The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.

Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening

We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.

History as the slaughter-bench