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.
Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.
He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe. Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one.
Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.
The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that βwhere ignorance is bliss, βtis folly to be wise.
Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created."We effectively became "time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers" with the invention of the clock."
Let's build a country of opportunities, where everybody is equal before the law and where the rules of the game are honest and transparent, and the same for everyone.
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