Life & Wisdom Quote by Bertolt Brecht

Hesitation, in Brecht's hands, isn’t a tender human foible; it’s a political problem with an escape hatch. "It's all right to hesitate if you then go ahead" grants doubt a temporary visa, not citizenship. The line feels almost merciful on first read, but its real sting is in the condition clause: hesitation is only redeemed by action. Brecht, the poet-dramatist of Marxist conviction and anti-fascist urgency, understood how easily moral anxiety can become a lifestyle - a way to appear thoughtful while staying safely inert.

The syntax does the work. "It's all right" borrows the tone of reassurance, the voice of a comrade or teacher trying to get someone moving. Then "if" snaps shut like a trapdoor. He isn't praising hesitation as depth; he’s policing it. The subtext is aimed at the comfortable skeptic, the endlessly deliberating intellectual, the citizen who can list every complication of resistance but never joins it. In Brechtian terms, hesitation is tolerable only as part of a process that ends in praxis.

Context matters: a writer shaped by Weimar instability, exile, and the brutal lesson that history doesn’t wait for your ethical clarity. Brecht’s theater tries to break the audience’s spell, to turn spectators into agents. This quote is a miniature version of that project: permission to think, paired with a demand to act. It’s a rebuke wrapped in encouragement, a reminder that decisiveness isn’t the absence of doubt - it’s what you do with it.