Top 100 Kraus Quotes
#1. An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best book I have seen on this engaging topic.
Istvan Deak
#2. I believe that the Welfare State redistributes poverty and reduces income. As Karl Kraus once said of psychoanalysis, the Welfare State is the disease which it purports to cure.
Arnold Kling
#4. Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.
Karl Kraus
#5. To be sure, the dog is loyal. But why, on that account, should we take him as an example? He is loyal to man, not to other dogs.
Karl Kraus
#6. Jealousy is a dog's bark which attracts thieves.
Karl Kraus
#7. If by day art is in the service of business, the evenings are devoted to the businessman's enjoyment of it. That is asking a lot of art, but art and the businessman make it work.
Karl Kraus
#8. What the teachers digest, the pupils eat.
Karl Kraus
#9. If children had been told that they could not blow their noses, this alone would make adults blush.
Karl Kraus
#10. Most people only do what they are asked to do; success comes to those who do a little more.
Karl Kraus
#11. Whose mouse are you?"
Nobody's mouse.
"Where is your mother?"
Inside a cat.
"Where is your father?"
Caught in a trap.
Robert Kraus
#12. The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.
Karl Kraus
#13. The real truths are those that can be invented.
Karl Kraus
#14. A "seducer" who boasts of initiating women into the mystery of love is like a stranger who arrives at a railroad station and offers to show the sights to a tourist guide.
Karl Kraus
#15. Fight piracy; don't squash innovation.
Joe Kraus
#16. When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human.' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.'
Karl Kraus
#17. Diplomacy is a game of chess in which the nations are checkmated.
Karl Kraus
#18. I don't like anyone. I don't understand why that's so difficult for people to understand.
Daniel Kraus
#19. Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein.
Karl Kraus
#20. Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?
Karl Kraus
#21. 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
#22. What do people have against convicts? Is living together in the pen of freedom, where young people engage in mutual psychology, any more beautiful?
Karl Kraus
#23. If someone calls me vain and mean, I know that he trusts me and has something to confess to me.
Karl Kraus
#24. A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.
Karl Kraus
#25. That an author takes a bow is not humility but presumption. What does the paleface want on the stage afterwards? But before the performance he had even less business there
and paying him royalties is equivalent to cheating the actors.
Karl Kraus
#26. Last week at school Pam Struger wondered why the brilliant girls all die.
Chris Kraus
#27. Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.
Karl Kraus
#28. The truth is that the newspaper is not a place for information to be given, rather it is just hollow content, or more than that, a provoker of content. If it prints lies about atrocities, real atrocities are the result.
Karl Kraus
#29. A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation.
Karl Kraus
#30. If one reads a newspaper only for information, one does not learn the truth, not even the truth about the paper. The truth is that the newspaper is not a statement of contents but the contents themselves; and more than that, it is an instigator.
Karl Kraus
#31. Family life is an encroachment on private life.
Karl Kraus
#32. I don't have the will for singing but I must do it.
Alfredo Kraus
#33. Many desire to kill me, and many wish to spend an hour chatting with me. The law protects me from the former.
Karl Kraus
#34. Even if everything between us was 80 percent in my own mind, I said, 20 percent had to come from you. You disagreed; insisted everything that passed between us was my own fabrication.
Chris Kraus
#35. Let language be the divining rod that finds the sources of thought.
Karl Kraus
#36. Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.
Karl Kraus
#37. The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.
Karl Kraus
#39. Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense.
Chris Kraus
#40. When I was seven I believed in God so I told Him I was sorry about kicking my sister and to "please not condemn me to eternal suffering in the interminable fires of Perdition for my transgressions.
Emma Rose Kraus
#41. I am not for women but against men.
Karl Kraus
#42. 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
#43. A healthy man is content with a woman. An erotic man is content with a stocking to get to a woman. A sick man is content with thestocking.
Karl Kraus
#44. Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.
Karl Kraus
#45. Parliamentarianism means putting political prostitution in barracks.
Karl Kraus
#46. There is no more unhappy being under the sun than a fetishist who pines for a boot and has to content himself with an entire woman.
Karl Kraus
#47. Remaining adolescent means rejecting all compensatory lies about one's life ...
Chris Kraus
#48. There is a shortage of clerks. Everyone is going into journalism.
Karl Kraus
#49. Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.
Karl Kraus
#50. Ask your neighbor only about things you know better yourself. Then his advice could prove valuable.
Karl Kraus
#51. The difference between psychiatrists and other mentally disturbed people is something like the relationship between concave and convex madness.
Karl Kraus
#52. The extraordinary ability of a woman to forget is not the same as the talent of a lady not to be able to remember.
Karl Kraus
#53. The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.
Karl Kraus
#54. Most people are sick. But only a few know that this is something they can be proud of. These are the psychoanalysts.
Karl Kraus
#55. A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time
Karl Kraus
#56. A fine world in which man reproaches woman with fulfilling his heart's desire!
Karl Kraus
#57. Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.
Karl Kraus
#58. If something is stolen from you, don't go to the police. They're not interested. Don't go to a psychologist either, because he's interested in only one thing: that it was really you who did the stealing.
Karl Kraus
#59. Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
Karl Kraus
#60. The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.
Karl Kraus
#61. Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.
Karl Kraus
#62. There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body; with the second, they match each other like body and clothes.
Karl Kraus
#63. Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?
Karl Kraus
#64. An idea's birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.
Karl Kraus
#65. Those who depend on television as their primary information source are condemned to ... A form of political illiteracy.
Bill Kraus
#66. Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.
Karl Kraus
#67. No one ... can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.
Chris Kraus
#68. Why didn't Eternity have this deformed age aborted ? Its birthmark is the stamp of a newspaper, its medium is printer's ink, and in its veins flows ink.
Karl Kraus
#69. The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is to attribute art to mental weakness, and then to trace the weakness back to the point where, according to analytic dogma, it originated namely, the lavatory.
Karl Kraus
#70. I'm thinking of the quote you cite from Levi-Strauss - a universe of information where the laws of savage thought reign once more.
Chris Kraus
#71. The ambulance left. My shoulders became gallows and from them I hanged.
Daniel Kraus
#72. A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.
Karl Kraus
#73. An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.
Karl Kraus
#74. One's need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well.
Karl Kraus
#75. Medicine: Your money and your life!
Karl Kraus
#76. Don't forget to balance optimism with fact and belief with reality.
Joe Kraus
#77. My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire timeliness.
Karl Kraus
#78. You'd be surprised how hard it can often be to translate an action into an idea.
Karl Kraus
#79. It was April the season of blood oranges, emotion running like the stream behind my house upstate, turbulent and thawing. I thought about how fragile people get when they withdraw from anything, how they become bloody yolks protected only by the thinnest shell
Chris Kraus
#80. Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.
Karl Kraus
#81. How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.
Karl Kraus
#82. The unattractive thing about chauvinism is not so much the aversion to other nations as the love of one's own.
Karl Kraus
#83. It is a mystery to me how a theologian can be praised for having brought himself to disbelieve dogmas. I've always thought that those who have brought themselves to believe in dogmas merit the true recognition owing a heroic deed.
Karl Kraus
#84. Leaves the body, transcends himself, herself, outside any system of belief. Freedom equals panic because without belief there is no language when you've lost yourself to empathy, a total shut down is the only way back in.
Chris Kraus
#85. Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.
Karl Kraus
#86. It's going to be crazy. All eight teams here are good teams. Hopefully the atmosphere will be great because it's going to be great basketball.
Chris Kraus
#87. An artist should make concessions to the listener. That is why Bruckner dedicated one of his symphonies to the Good Lord.
Karl Kraus
#88. Why should women settle to think and talk about just femaleness when men were constantly transcending gender?
Chris Kraus
#89. Immortality is the only thing which doesn't tolerate being postponed.
Karl Kraus
#90. I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.
Karl Kraus
#91. Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.
Karl Kraus
#92. Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.
Karl Kraus
#93. Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.
Karl Kraus
#94. A cigar," said the altruist, "a cigar, my good man, I cannot give you. But any time you need a light, just come around; mine is always lit.
Karl Kraus
#96. Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.
Karl Kraus
#97. Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.
Karl Kraus
#98. The cost of hiring someone bad is so much greater than missing out on someone good.
Joe Kraus
#99. I master only the language of others. Mine does with me what it wants.
Karl Kraus
#100. To me it's still a greater miracle when a fly flies than when a human being undertakes to do so.
Karl Kraus
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