Bertolt Brecht Quotes

I have seen what the days of tribulation can do to people. I have seen hunger stalk the streets of Europe. I have witnessed the appalling, emaciated shadows of human figures. I have seen women and children scavenge army garbage dumps for scraps of food. Those scenes and nameless faces cannot be erased from my memory.

Starvation and disease are the original weapons of mass destruction. When you burn fields and kill animals, people are left vulnerable.

I hate war... for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.

By the breaking in of enraged merciless armies, flourishing countries have been laid waste, great numbers of people have perished in a short time, and many more have been pressed with poverty and grief.

Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture …

Violence always leads to more violence…. To the conqueror comes a conqueror.

Where there is hunger there is no hope. There is only desolation and pain. Hunger nurtures violence and fanaticism. A world where people starve will never be safe

This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.

Blue is the smoke of wrar, white the bones of men.

Poverty and War have no excuse.

No spoon has yet destroyed a mouth, but the knife of war cuts portions that are hard to swallow. Perhaps the big mouths of the privileged are able to cope with them, but they dull the teeth of the little people and ruin their stomachs.

War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.

They make a desert and call it peace.

War, at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible.

During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places.

I imagine the world dividing into the people who want to feed their children, and the ones shooting at them.

Oh Lord, are there really people starving still?

When you see a 14-year-old boy who has never known what peace looks like for a day in his life, there's part of you as a human being that feels some degree, you can say, compassion for the fact that these boys have known war, famine, violence and death from the day they were born.

War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.

When people are hungry, when a mother or father is facing a child that they can't feed, you can't ask that family to lay down their arms.

War is hell. Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good... war sucks.

Having seen war, you obviously learned to hate war.

The alternative to peace is war, which will expose everyone to mass casualties, misery and a loss of perspective for many years to come.

War remains the decisive human failure.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.