"What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?"
About this Quote
Brecht’s line lands like a gag and then keeps detonating. It flips the moral hierarchy with a simple scale comparison: the petty criminal versus the respectable institution. The punch isn’t that bank robbing is good; it’s that our outrage is selectively calibrated. A masked thief is legible villainy, cleanly narratable and easy to punish. “Founding a bank” arrives dressed in legality, paperwork, and civic prestige, yet Brecht insinuates it can produce harm on a grander, more systemic scale.
The intent is agitational, not merely clever. Brecht, steeped in Marxist critique and writing against the backdrop of interwar instability, mass unemployment, and the social churn that fed fascism, is targeting the way capitalism launders coercion into normality. He wants the audience to notice that exploitation doesn’t always look like violence; it looks like contracts, interest rates, foreclosures, and the quiet transfer of risk downward. The bank, as a symbol, isn’t just a building with money. It’s a machine for making wealth extract itself from those who can least afford to lose it.
The subtext is also about theater: Brecht’s “alienation effect” aimed to break the spell of empathy and force analysis. This line does that in miniature. It forces a double take, making “crime” feel like a social label rather than a moral fact. The satire bites because it borrows the language of common sense and then exposes how common sense is often just the ideology that won.
The intent is agitational, not merely clever. Brecht, steeped in Marxist critique and writing against the backdrop of interwar instability, mass unemployment, and the social churn that fed fascism, is targeting the way capitalism launders coercion into normality. He wants the audience to notice that exploitation doesn’t always look like violence; it looks like contracts, interest rates, foreclosures, and the quiet transfer of risk downward. The bank, as a symbol, isn’t just a building with money. It’s a machine for making wealth extract itself from those who can least afford to lose it.
The subtext is also about theater: Brecht’s “alienation effect” aimed to break the spell of empathy and force analysis. This line does that in miniature. It forces a double take, making “crime” feel like a social label rather than a moral fact. The satire bites because it borrows the language of common sense and then exposes how common sense is often just the ideology that won.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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