Quote

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

Karl Kraus

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Karl Kraus
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: March 28
Died: 1936
Died: June 12
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Playwright
Poet
Translator
Writer
Jicin
Someone
Afterwards
Everything
Backwards
Always
Facing
Historian
Prophet
Journalist
Journalism
Knew
Beforehand

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Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.
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The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.
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Many desire to kill me, and many wish to spend an hour chatting with me. The law protects me from the former.
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A man's eroticism is a woman's sexuality.
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Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.
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A good writer does not receive anywhere near the number of poison-pen letters that is commonly assumed. Among a hundred jackassesthere are not ten who will admit to being jackasses, and at most one who will put it in writing.
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Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
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A comprehensive education is a well-stocked pharmacy: but we have no assurance that potassium cyanide will not be administered fora head cold.
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A fine world in which man reproaches woman with fulfilling his heart's desire!
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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.
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A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on non-alcoholic wine.
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Prussia: freedom of movement with a muzzle. Austria: an isolation cell in which screaming is allowed.
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Satires which the censor can understand are justly forbidden
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Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest.
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When I want to go to sleep, I must first get a whole menagerie of voices to shut up. You wouldn't believe what a racket they make in my room.
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There is a cultural taste which tries very hard to get rid of the lice in a fur coat. There is another which tolerates the lice and thinks the coat can be worn with them in it. And finally there is a taste which regards the lice as the most important thing about the coat and consequently places the coat at the lice's disposal.
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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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It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.
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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.
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We are sacrificing ourselves for our ready-made goods we are consumers and live in such a way that the means may consume the end.
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