Love Quote by Bertolt Brecht

Brecht’s line doesn’t romanticize war so much as indict the stories that keep it alive. “War is like love” is a deliberately dangerous simile: it borrows the cultural alibi we give romance - inevitability, destiny, the idea that desire outruns reason - and hands it to organized violence. If love “always finds a way,” we’re trained to hear persistence as virtue. Brecht twists that reflex until it curdles. The phrase becomes an accusation: war survives not because it’s fated, but because societies keep arranging circumstances in which it can “find” its path - through profit, propaganda, boredom, grievance, and the cheap dopamine of belonging.

The subtext is classic Brechtian anti-seduction. He’s allergic to narratives that make suffering feel natural. “Finds a way” suggests war as a clever organism, adaptive, opportunistic, always ready to exploit a crack in the moral infrastructure. That sly agency is the point: if war is always finding routes, someone is always leaving doors unlocked. The line exposes how quickly people accept war’s return as weather rather than policy.

Context matters: Brecht wrote in the shadow of two world wars and the machinery of fascism, where mass persuasion made catastrophe feel like necessity. As a poet and dramatist committed to demystifying power, he compresses a whole theory of complicity into a catchy proverb. It’s memorable in the same way propaganda is memorable - and that’s part of the critique. Brecht weaponizes the aphorism form to show how easily a pleasing sentence can smuggle an ugly permission slip.