Life & Wisdom Quote by Hermann Broch

A promise, in Broch's telling, is less a moral contract than a political technology: a cheap, renewable resource extracted from public need. The line lands with the cold efficiency of a diagnosis. It’s not simply that leaders lie; it’s that the system is built to reward the performance of intention over the labor of delivery. “Promising” becomes the real product, because it flatters the crowd with relevance and agency while postponing the reckoning where power might actually be measured.

The sting is in “hope alone.” Broch isn’t praising hope as noble resilience; he’s describing it as an opiate that keeps societies functional when institutions fail. The subtext is contempt for a public trained to confuse emotional sustenance with material change. If people can be kept waiting in a perpetual near-future, they can be managed indefinitely. Hope becomes the substitute currency for justice, wages, stability, even truth.

Context matters: Broch wrote in a Europe scarred by collapsing empires, economic crisis, and the propaganda-rich ascent of mass politics. In that atmosphere, rhetoric didn’t just accompany power; it replaced it. The sentence reads like an early warning about the modern attention economy, where announcement outperforms outcome and credibility is less valuable than momentum. It also indicts citizens, uncomfortably: when hope is all you’re offered, it can start to feel like all you deserve.