Life & Wisdom Quote by Bertolt Brecht

Goodness, Brecht implies, is not a saintly essence you can store up like coal for winter. Its fuel is social appetite. When “goodness is not in demand,” morality becomes a kind of unpaid labor: costly, isolating, and eventually impossible to sustain without either martyrdom or hypocrisy. The line carries Brecht’s signature suspicion of virtue-as-personality and redirects attention to the marketplace of incentives where ethics actually lives.

The phrasing is chillingly transactional: “demand” belongs to economics, not the confessional. Brecht is smuggling Marxist critique into a proverb. If a society rewards cruelty, punishes generosity, and treats solidarity as weakness, then “good people” aren’t evidence of moral health; they’re statistical anomalies. This isn’t an excuse for bad behavior so much as an indictment of the conditions that make goodness rare. Brecht’s theater repeatedly stages this problem: characters who want to do right but are trained by scarcity, surveillance, and exploitation to do what works. The moral is structural, not sentimental.

The subtext bites hardest against liberal comfort: stop praising individual virtue while tolerating systems that price it out. “Good for long” hints at endurance, the slow erosion of conscience under constant penalty. Brecht, writing through Weimar instability, fascism’s rise, and exile, had watched the public sphere turn ethics into liability. In that world, goodness isn’t merely difficult; it’s professionally inadvisable.

The quote’s intent, then, is provocatively pragmatic: if you want more decency, make it viable. Create institutions, norms, and material security that actually demand it, and goodness stops being heroism and becomes habit.