The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.
Art serves to rinse out our eyes.
Kraus's barbed aphorisms were an essential part of his running commentary on Viennese culture. These miniature gems, as sharp as diamonds, demonstrate Kraus's highly cultivated wit and his unerring eye for human weakness, flaccidity, and hypocrisy. By turns antagonistic, pacifistic, realistic, and maddeningly misogynistic, Kraus's aphorisms provide the sting that precedes healing. In this new translation, Jonathan McVity masterfully renders Kraus's multilayered meanings, preserving the clever wordplay of the German in readable colloquial English. He also provides an introductory essay on Kraus's life and milieu and annotations that clarify many of the literary and sociohistorical allusions in the aphorisms.