None will improve your lot If you yourself do not.
Interpretation
Personal effort is essential for improvement; external help is insufficient.
Bertolt Brecht emphasizes the importance of taking personal responsibility for one's own progress and success. The quote suggests that without active participation and effort from the individual, no external factors or assistance will lead to meaningful change or improvement in one's circumstances.
In practice
In a motivational speech to students about taking control of their futures.
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.
I may not be the most physically tough player, but I think mentally I'm right up there.
Whatever one man is capable of imagining, other men will prove themselves capable of realizing.
I hope the millions of people I've touched have the optimism and desire to share their goals and hard work and persevere with a positive attitude.
If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off... no matter what they say.
If you are not in the process of becoming the person you want to be, you are automatically engaged in becoming the person you don't want to be.
We all assume that if you're weak and poor, you're never going to win. In fact, the real world is full of examples where the exact opposite happens, where the weak win and the strong screw up.
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