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

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Blushing, palpitations, a bad conscience--this is what you get if you haven't sinned.
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Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.
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If you wish to form a clear judgment on your friends, consult your dreams.
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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.
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The triumph of morality: A thief who has broken into a bedroom claims his sense of shame had been outraged, and by threatening theoccupants with exposure of an immoral act he blackmails them into not bringing charges for burglary.
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The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.
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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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Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?
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Sorrento, August. For two weeks now I haven't heard a German word or understood an Italian one. This way one can manage to live with people everything goes like clockwork and no irksome misunderstanding can arise.
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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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The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.
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Since the day man first tried to conquer space, the earth has been mobilizing.
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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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Not greeting people isn't enough. One also doesn't greet people one doesn't know.
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I trim my opponents to fit my arrows.
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I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear.
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Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.
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So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes--with the exception of their occupation.
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Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don't come into the world.
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