What kind of times are they, when A talk about trees is almost a crime Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
Interpretation
The quote expresses concern about societal issues being ignored in favor of trivial topics.
Bertolt Brecht's quote highlights a profound societal critique, suggesting that discussing nature, represented by trees, is seen as inappropriate during times filled with significant human suffering and injustice. It implies that focusing on such peaceful subjects can detract from the urgent need to address the horrors that are occurring, thus reflecting a moral dilemma about the responsibilities of individuals in acknowledging and confronting social issues.
In practice
In a speech about environmental conservation, one might reference this quote to emphasize the urgency of addressing both ecological and social issues.
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.
How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?
The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.
Lots of my dying patients say they grow in bounds and leaps, and finish all the unfinished business. But assisting a suicide is cheating them of these lessons, like taking a student out of school before final exams. That's not love, it's projecting your own unfinished business
Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. . . look to Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day.
Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.
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