“Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.”

— Karl Kraus

“In these great times,” Harry Zohn, trans., In These Great Times (Montreal: 1976), pp. 73-74

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence." by Karl Kraus?

Karl Kraus 94

Czech playwright and publicist 1874–1936

Related quotes

“Progress … has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

“In these great times,” Harry Zohn, trans., In These Great Times (Montreal: 1976), pp. 73-74

“Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture. That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Section 2, paragraph 34-35
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

“For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention – in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being.”

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Russian composer, pianist and conductor

Igor Stravinsky (1936). An Autobiography, p. 53-54.
1930s

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

“Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

Gretchen Rubin (1966) American writer

Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“To do nothing now is to let our children lament that they never knew the magnificent diversity of humankind because our generation let disappear those cultures that might have taught it to them.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968), p. 276

“In these and other ways, let us move up the steep and difficult path toward comprehensive disarmament, securing mutual confidence through mutual verification, and building the institutions of peace as we dismantle the engines of war. We must not let failure to agree on all points delay agreements where agreement is possible. And we must not put forward proposals for propaganda purposes.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, UN speech

“Let us be under no illusion. The Jewish spirit, which was responsible for the alliance of large-scale capital with Marxism and was the driving force behind so many anti-Spanish revolutionary agreements, will not be got rid of in a day.”

Francisco Franco (1892–1975) Spanish general and dictator

Victory speech in Madrid (19 May 1939)

“Culture is knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world; in other words, culture means reading, not idle and casual reading, but reading that is controlled and directed by a definite purpose.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

Source: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), p. 194
Context: Culture is knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world; in other words, culture means reading, not idle and casual reading, but reading that is controlled and directed by a definite purpose. Reading, so understood, is difficult, and contrary to an almost universal belief, those who can do it are very few. I have already remarked the fact that there is no more groundless assumption than that literacy carries with it the ability to read. At the age of seventy-nine Goethe said that those who make this assumption "do not know what time and trouble it costs to learn to read. I have been working at it for eighteen years, and I can't say yet that I am completely successful."

“The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistance and of the instruments (machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

“Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Karl Kraus 94

Related quotes

Related topics