“A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
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Famous Karl Kraus Quotes
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Education is what most receive, many pass on, and few possess.”
Source: No Compromise: Selected Writings of Karl Kraus
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“There are people who can never forgive a beggar for their not having given him anything.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Hate must make a man productive. Otherwise one might as well love.”
“A great deal of learning can be packed into an empty head.”
“Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.”
Source: No Compromise: Selected Writings of Karl Kraus
“Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while washing them.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
Source: Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry
“In Berlin, things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.”
“My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.”
Source: No Compromise: Selected Writings of Karl Kraus
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Moral responsibility is what is lacking in a man when he demands it of a woman.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half.”
Source: Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry
Source: Dicta and Contradicta
“I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.”
Source: No Compromise: Selected Writings of Karl Kraus
“Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Psychoanalysts are father confessors who like to listen to the sins of the father as well.”
“An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.”
“The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“In case of doubt, decide in favor of what is correct.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.”
“The psychoanalysts pick our dreams as if they were our pockets.”
Source: Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry
Source: Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry