Life & Wisdom Quote by Friedrich Durrenmatt

Durrenmatt lands the punch in the pivot: not the diagnosis ("inhuman world") but the snagging little "But how?" It’s the sound of a moral demand colliding with the machinery of modern life, where outrage is cheap and solutions are either cosmetic or catastrophic. As a dramatist of grotesque systems and unintended consequences, he isn’t offering a slogan for kinder behavior; he’s setting a trap for anyone who thinks ethics can be willed into existence without confronting power, incentives, and complicity.

The first sentence reads like a civic prayer, almost banal in its righteousness. That’s intentional. It mimics the language of postwar humanism, the kind of statement everyone can applaud. Then the second sentence punctures the applause. "How?" forces the listener to account for means, not just ends. It also implies a suspicion: many projects to "make the world humane" have historically arrived wearing uniforms, carrying ledgers, or drafting laws that tidy up violence with bureaucratic elegance.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of World War II and into the Cold War, Durrenmatt watched "reasonable" societies build rational systems capable of irrational cruelty: totalitarianism, nuclear brinkmanship, technocratic indifference. His work repeatedly argues that the world is less a moral stage than a chaotic apparatus where good intentions get mangled.

The subtext is accusatory and self-directed: if the world is inhuman, it’s because humans made it that way and keep it running. "But how?" isn’t despair; it’s a refusal to let moral certainty become an alibi.