Karl Kraus Quotes
I can say with pride that I have spent days and nights not reading anything, and that with unflagging energy I use every moment toacquire gradually an encyclopedic lack of education.
Kraus, Karl. Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms. Edited and translated by Harry Zohn, University of Chicago Press, 1990.
In early America, as today, there was a substantial element of American society who distrusted intellectuals and education. They saw education as promoting inequality and leading to an aristocracy. Reading was actually attacked by many on the grounds that one’s thinking skills would atrophy. (Today we worry about TV eroding reading skills.) “Summum bonum” is Latin meaning “the Highest Good”.
Karl Kraus was an Austrian writer and journalist, known as a satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet. He directed his satire at the press, German culture, and German and Austrian politics. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times.
