Bertolt Brecht Quotes

Grub first, then ethics.

You will be tempted by the need to feed yourself.

If I'm walking down the riverbank, and a man is drowning, even if I don't know how to swim very well, I feel this urge that the right thing to do is to try to save that person. Evolution would tell me exactly the opposite: preserve your DNA. Who cares about the guy who's drowning?

Self-preservation is the first principle of our nature.

My rule is to save myself first.

Morality is a luxury we can't afford out here. There's no right or wrong, just survival or death.

First the grub, then the morals.

Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.

First feed the face, then talk right and wrong.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

When we are confronted with extreme situations, we forget about moral issues; we simply act and must then accept the consequences.

Self-preservation, nature's first great law, all the creatures, except man, doth awe.

We are driven by five genetic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun.

When we were engaged in the problems of survival we had no time to have anything to do with culture.

It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.

You have to kill to survive. People have been doing it forever. I eat meat, and I eat fish. If I were on a deserted island I would need that to survive.

Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating. It means nothing.

Hunger is insolent, and will be fed.

Necessity makes an honest man a knave.

They went into stores to get food to stay alive. Looting isn't the right word. I call it survival.

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.

A man's own safety is a god that sometimes makes very grim demands.

If you're hungry, you know that you want to eat. You don't know what's on the menu - perhaps it's not your favorite dish - but you will eat.

Survival is important, art is secondary. If you aren't alive, how can you create art?

The trouble is, the same thing that enabled us to survive evolution is also going to kill us, because in the final analysis, if survival is the primary motivation of every human being, then we will finally be in a situation where might will make right and only one person will survive.