What they could do with 'round here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that peace without structure can lead to chaos and disorder.
Bertolt Brecht's quote critiques the notion of peace by highlighting that without proper organization and direction, it may descend into confusion and lawlessness. Brecht implies that society requires guiding principles and structures to ensure that peace is productive rather than merely a state of inactivity or absence of conflict, which can lead to dysfunction and turmoil.
In practice
In a discussion about community organization, you might say, 'As Brecht noted, what we need is a good war, for with peace running wild, we often find chaos.'
The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs.... Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.
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.
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his or her own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other's faces.
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.
God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being made and let God be God in you.
Truth is proper and beautiful in all times and in all places.
This is the great lesson that we are here to learn through myriads of births and heavens and hells - that there is nothing to be asked for, desired for, beyond one's spiritual Self (atman).
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