Karl Kraus may refer to:
One can translate an editorial but not a poem. For one can go across the border naked but not without one's skin; for, unlike clothes, one cannot get a new skin.
Why didn't Eternity have this deformed age aborted ? Its birthmark is the stamp of a newspaper, its medium is printer's ink, and in its veins flows ink.
Most people are sick. But only a few know that this is something they can be proud of. These are the psychoanalysts.
Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustibility which keeps life from being impoverished. Let men learn to serve language.
News reports stand up as people, and people wither into editorials. Clichés walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot off.
Parliamentarianism means putting political prostitution in barracks.
To be sure, the dog is loyal. But why, on that account, should we take him as an example? He is loyal to man, not to other dogs.
The tyranny of necessity grants its slaves three kinds of freedom: opinion free from intellect, entertainment free from art, and orgies free from love.
There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body; with the second, they match each other like body and clothes.
The real truths are those that can be invented.
Most people only do what they are asked to do; success comes to those who do a little more.
A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.
A bibliophile has approximately the same relationship to literature as a philatelist to geography.
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.
Education is what most receive, many pass on, and few possess.
The difference between psychiatrists and other mentally disturbed people is something like the relationship between concave and convex madness.
Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.
Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.
A great deal of learning can be packed into an empty head.
It is a mystery to me how a theologian can be praised for having brought himself to disbelieve dogmas. I've always thought that those who have brought themselves to believe in dogmas merit the true recognition owing a heroic deed.