Parenting & Family Quote by Brian May

“Sanctions always hurt the poor, the weak, the children” is a musician’s line with a ballad’s moral clarity: blunt, rhythmic, and built to land in the gut before it lands in a policy memo. Brian May isn’t trying to litigate the fine print of targeted versus comprehensive sanctions; he’s spotlighting the recurring optics and the recurring bodies. The word “always” is doing deliberate work - an insistence that, whatever sanctions are supposed to do to governments, they reliably do something else to civilians first.

The subtext is an indictment of distance. Sanctions let powerful countries perform toughness without sending troops, but that “clean” alternative often pushes scarcity down the social ladder: prices spike, medicine disappears, infrastructure crumbles, and the people with savings, connections, or passports find workarounds. The ones who can’t - the poor and the sick, children whose lives depend on stable supply chains - become the pressure point. The cruelty isn’t always intentional, but it’s structurally predictable, and May’s phrasing treats that predictability as culpability.

Coming from a pop-cultural figure, the intent is less technocratic than ethical: to puncture the reassuring story that sanctions are “smart” or “humane” by default. It’s also a warning about moral outsourcing. When punishment is administered through economics, suffering looks like an unfortunate byproduct instead of a chosen instrument. May compresses that evasion into a single line and dares the listener to keep calling it collateral.