The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!" 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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the desensitization of society to violence and suffering over time.
Bertolt Brecht's quote highlights how humanity often becomes numb to repeated instances of violence and injustice. As atrocities occur more frequently, individual outcries fade away, leading to a collective silence that allows evil actions to persist unchallenged. The metaphor of falling rain suggests that just as rain becomes part of the environment, so too do the cries of suffering become background noise, ignored and overlooked by society.
In practice
During a discussion on social injustice, this quote can serve as a powerful reminder of the need to speak out against wrongdoings.
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.
The one thing with writing stories about the rise of fascism is that if you wait long enough, you'll almost certainly be proved right. Fascism is like a hydra - you can cut off its head in the Germany of the '30s and '40s, but it'll still turn up on your back doorstep in a slightly altered guise.
Stop trying to change the world since it is only the mirror. Man’s attempt to change the world by force is as fruitless as breaking a mirror in the hope of changing his face. Leave the mirror and change your face. Leave the world alone and change your conceptions of yourself.
Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.
War can only be qualified by its object, and there is neither foreign war nor civil war, there is only just or unjust war.
The two systems slave and free-labor are incompatible. They have never permanently existed together in one country, and they never can.
Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.
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