Life & Wisdom Quote by Bertolt Brecht

Four words compress an entire social philosophy. The line refuses the myth of the self-made person and replaces it with a clear picture of mutual dependence. Need is not a defect limited to the weak; it is the normal condition of human life. Help is not a one-way gesture from the strong to the needy; it is the web that holds a society together. By coupling everyone with everyone, the sentence levels hierarchies and exposes all the hidden scaffolding of power: the executive depends on the cleaner, the general on the cook, the artist on the stagehand and the audience, the scientist on the lab tech and the taxpayer. Even prosperity and genius turn out to be collective achievements, accumulated from countless acts of assistance, instruction, and care.

The voice behind the line is Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright who built his art on a Marxist sense of social interconnection. Writing through crisis, exile, and war, he distrusted sentimental charity and heroic individualism. His epic theater aimed to estrange audiences from passive habit so they could see the social machinery producing suffering and ask how to alter it. The sentence fits that project. It dignifies dependency, reframing it as reciprocity, and shifts ethics from private benevolence to public solidarity. Help becomes a structure, not a favor. It points toward unions, public health, universal education, tenant councils, mutual aid networks, the institutions and movements that turn scattered goodwill into reliable support.

There is also an artistic subtext. Theater is the collective form par excellence, where actors, writers, designers, and workers all rely on each other and on the audience to complete the work. Brecht makes that practical truth into a political one. If everyone needs help from everyone, then the good society is the one that organizes that fact openly and justly, so that dependence does not humiliate but connects, and no life is left to be sustained by luck.