One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the distinction between a person's true self and their public persona.
Bertolt Brecht implies that individuals often confuse the representation of a person in media or art with their actual existence and voice. This suggests a deeper philosophical observation about identity and perception, urging us to recognize that what we see and hear may not fully encapsulate a person's true essence.
In practice
During a lecture on media influence, this quote can illustrate how public figures are presented versus their real lives.
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.
Like looking through a telescope into the Milky Way and wondering if we're alone in the universe, it made me realize with the glaring clarity of desert light how scarce and delicate life is, how insignificant we are compared with the forces of nature and the dimensions of space.
Evil gains work their punishment.
There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.
Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched behind one now stretches before him.
Usually the threat of death makes people a lot more aware of their lives.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.