Karl Kraus Quotes
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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.
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When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on.
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A white lie is always pardonable. But he who tells the truth without compulsion merits no leniency.
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I knew a man who carried his education in his vest pocket because there was more room there than in his head.
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The heroes of obtrusiveness, people with whom no soldier would lie down in the trenches, though he has to submit to being interviewed by them, break into recently abandoned royal castles so that they can report, "We got there first!" It would be far less shameful to be paid for committing atrocities than for fabricating them.
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An illusion of depth often occurs if a blockhead is a muddlehead at the same time
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My request that my writing be read twice has aroused great indignation. Unjustly so. After all, I do not ask that they be read once.
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Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor just wanted to see what it was like in there.
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It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.
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Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.
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Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain.
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Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.
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Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.
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A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.
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One cleans someone else's threshold of consciousness only if one's own home is dirty.
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Hate must make a man productive. Otherwise one might as well love.
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You don't even live once.
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It is regarded as normal to consecrate virginity in general and to lust for its destruction in particular.
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The pimp is the executive organ of immorality. The executive organ of morality is the blackmailer.
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One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.
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What the teachers digest, the pupils eat.
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One's need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well.
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Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.
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The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.
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A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.
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If children had been told that they could not blow their noses, this alone would make adults blush.
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It is uplifting to lose one?s faith in a reality which looks the way it is described in a newspaper.
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Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?
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Psychology is as useless as directions for using poison.
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Insights into erotic life belong to art, not education. But sometimes these have to be spelled out for the illiterates. And it ismainly a matter of convincing the illiterates, for they are the ones who write the penal code.
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