Life & Wisdom Quote by Friedrich Durrenmatt

Durrenmatt lands the punch by pretending to offer a neat comparative diagnosis, then letting the symmetry implicate both sides. “Spy” and “criminal” look like opposites - the first political, the second moral - but the real target is the shared habit underneath: a society trained to treat ordinary people as latent threats. The line works because it refuses the Cold War comfort of moral hierarchy. It concedes the Soviet obsession with espionage while quietly arguing that America’s preferred paranoia is just as corrosive, only laundered through a different vocabulary.

The intent isn’t to equate systems as identical; it’s to expose how each manufactures suspicion in its own image. In Russia, the fear is ideological betrayal: your neighbor might be an agent of the state or the counter-state. In the U.S., the fear is legal and punitive: your neighbor might be one bad act away from being managed by police, courts, and prisons. “Everybody takes everybody else” is the bleak engine here - not “the government,” not “the secret police,” but the social atmosphere itself, suspicion passed horizontally like gossip.

Context matters: Durrenmatt, a Swiss dramatist steeped in tragicomedy and moral paradox, writes from the vantage of a small country watching superpowers turn anxiety into common sense. The subtext is theatrical: when a culture casts everyone as suspect, everyone starts performing innocence. That performance is the real loss - citizenship reduced to self-surveillance, and trust replaced by a permanent, low-grade trial.