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Austrian · 1874-1936 · 37 quotes
Austrian · 1874–1936
37 quotes in our collection
Karl Kraus was the Austrian satirist, aphorist, and journalist who published Die Fackel — The Torch — almost single-handedly for thirty-seven years in Vienna, using it to savage the press, the courts, politicians, and the psychoanalysts with equal ferocity. Born in 1874, he began as a theatre critic and became the most feared writer in the German-speaking world: his targets sometimes sued him, always unsuccessfully. His aphorisms have the density of compressed gas — experiences are savings a miser puts aside; wisdom is the inheritance a wastrel cannot exhaust — and his diagnosis of journalism and its relationship to civilisation has grown more accurate since his death. Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy is perhaps the most economical critical sentence of the twentieth century.
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