A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.
Karl Kraus
A man's eroticism is a woman's sexuality.
Karl Kraus
A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation.
Karl Kraus
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
Karl Kraus
Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life.
Karl Kraus
An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.
Karl Kraus
Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?
Karl Kraus
Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.
Karl Kraus
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
Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.
Karl Kraus
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.
Karl Kraus
Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.
Karl Kraus
Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
Karl Kraus
Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.
Karl Kraus
He who does without the praise of the crowd will not deny himself an opportunity to be his own adherent.
Karl Kraus
How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.
Karl Kraus
If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.
Karl Kraus
Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.
Karl Kraus
It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.
Karl Kraus
Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.
Karl Kraus
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.
Karl Kraus
Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.
Karl Kraus
Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.
Karl Kraus
My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.
Karl Kraus
News reports stand up as people, and people wither into editorials. ClichTs walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot off.
Karl Kraus
Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.
Karl Kraus
Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.
Karl Kraus
Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.
Karl Kraus
The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.
Karl Kraus
The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.
Karl Kraus
The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.
Karl Kraus
The press, that goiter of the world, swells up with the desire for conquest and bursts with the achievements which every day brings. A week has room for the boldest climax of the human drive for expansion.
Karl Kraus
The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.
Karl Kraus
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
War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.
Karl Kraus
|
Type:
Writer
Date of Birth:
1874-04-28
Year of Death:
1936
Nationality:
Austrian |
