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How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

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
Lying
Volcano
Social
Volcanoes
Spider
Refrain
Spiders
Across
Lies
Refrains
Powerful
Mores

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Many talents preserve their precociousness right into old age.
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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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On the stage one must not confuse the nature of a personality with the naturalness of a person.
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A good stylist should have narcissistic enjoyment as he works. He must be able to objectivize his work to such an extent that he catches himself feeling envious and has to jog his memory to find that he is himself the creator. In short, he must display that highest degree of objectivity which the world calls vanity.
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Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.
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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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Talent is often a defect in character.
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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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One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.
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The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on.
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They judge lest they be judged.
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I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.
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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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Prussia: freedom of movement with a muzzle. Austria: an isolation cell in which screaming is allowed.
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Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought.
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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.
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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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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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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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Morality is the tendency to pour out the baby with the bathwater.
Karl Kraus