Karl Kraus Quotes - Page 7

The little stations are very proud because the expresses have to pass them by.

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought.

Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest.

A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.

Psychoanalysts are father confessors who like to listen to the sins of the father as well.

It is the mission of the press to disseminate intellect and at the same time destroy receptivity to it.

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.

Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain.

I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.

The real truths are those that can be invented.

I can say with pride that I have spent days and nights not reading anything, and that with unflagging energy I use every moment toacquire gradually an encyclopedic lack of education.

A plagiarist should be made to copy the author a hundred times.

They judge lest they be judged.

Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein.

In a hollow head there is much room for knowledge.

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

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Not greeting people isn't enough. One also doesn't greet people one doesn't know.

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

Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.

How unreliable is the woman caught being faithful! Today she is faithful to you, tomorrow to another.

The new psychiatrists say that everything and anything can be traced back to sexual causes. Their method, for example, could be explained as the eroticism of father confessors.

To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.