Karl Kraus Quotes

• Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbati*n. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.

  Karl Kraus

• The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the p*rnographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.

  Karl Kraus

  Topics in Life, Love

  Tags in Politician

• The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.

  Karl Kraus

  Tags in Press

• Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.

  Karl Kraus

  Tags in Scandal

• Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

  Karl Kraus

  Tags in Morality

• One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.

  Karl Kraus

• Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.

  Karl Kraus

  Topics in Progress

• He who does without the praise of the crowd will not deny himself an opportunity to be his own adherent.

  Karl Kraus

• Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.

  Karl Kraus

  Topics in Justice

• Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?

  Karl Kraus

  Topics in Children

• Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.

  Karl Kraus

  Tags in Culture

• If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.

  Karl Kraus

  Topics in Truth

• This is something that I cannot get over / that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

  Karl Kraus

  Topics in Work

• An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

  Karl Kraus

  Topics in Truth

• He who sleeps half a day has won half a life.

  Karl Kraus

  Topics in Life

• Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor that just wanted to see what it was like in there.

  Karl Kraus

  Tags in Psychoanalysis

• When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.

  Karl Kraus

  Tags in Culture

• Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

  Karl Kraus

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Newspapers

• Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

  Karl Kraus

  Topics in Art

• Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.

  Karl Kraus

  Tags in Morality, Christianity

Karl Kraus (78)

Birth:	28th April, 1874
Death:	12th June, 1936
Nationality:	Austrian
Profession:	Writer, Journalist

About

Karl Kraus was an Austrian writer and journalist, known as a satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet. He is considered the first major European satirist since Jonathan Swift. He directed his satire to the press, German culture, and German and Austrian politics.

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Today's Anniversary - 7th April

Births

• 1907 - Joshua L. Liebman
• 1949 - Mitch Daniels
• 1964 - Russell Crowe
• 1907 - Violette Leduc
• 1890 - Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Deaths

• 1984 - Samuel G. Engel
• 2004 - Victor Argo
• 1958 - Elliot Paul
• 2012 - Mike Wallace
• 1668 - William Davenant