Justice & Law Quote by Bertolt Brecht

Brecht doesn’t dress this up as critique; he files it as a bill of indictment. “The law was made for one thing alone” is willfully absolute, a prosecutor’s move that refuses the comforting civics-class myth that law is neutral infrastructure. He collapses the whole edifice into a single function: exploitation. The line works because it targets not only corrupt officials but the moral alibi that lets decent societies keep calling unequal outcomes “justice.”

The pairing is the dagger: those who “don’t understand” the law and those “prevented by naked misery from obeying it.” Brecht splits the exploited into two classes the system loves: the legally illiterate and the economically cornered. One can’t navigate the maze; the other can’t afford to follow the rules even if they know them. “Naked misery” isn’t metaphorical flourish so much as a refusal of polite language. Poverty isn’t a character flaw or an unfortunate background condition; it is coercion, a force that makes obedience a luxury good.

Written in the shadow of Weimar instability, rising fascism, and Brecht’s Marxist theater project, the sentence carries the logic of his “alienation” technique: make the familiar seem strange so the audience notices the machinery. Law here isn’t a shared social contract; it’s a specialized dialect spoken by the powerful, enforced on the powerless, and then used to blame them for failing the exam. The cynicism is strategic. By overstating, Brecht forces a question modern democracies still dodge: if the law’s promise is equality, why does it so reliably punish disadvantage as if it were guilt?