Art & Creativity Quote by Karl Kraus

Karl Kraus compresses a paradox about journalism: a profession driven by deadlines manufactures utterance first, substance second. He suggests that many journalists write not from necessity of insight but from necessity of production; then, by virtue of publication, their words acquire the status of significance. The act of writing confers the aura of having something to say, even when the initial impulse lacked content.

Kraus, the Viennese satirist who edited the magazine Die Fackel, spent his career excoriating the press for its role in corrupting language and public morals, especially during the years around World War I. He saw major papers as factories of opinion, where convenience, advertising, and speed outranked truth. For him, bad writing was not merely ugly; it was dangerous, because sloppy language breeds sloppy thought.

The first clause skewers the compulsion to fill columns: daily pages demand copy; the writer supplies it whether or not new understanding exists. The second clause exposes the feedback loop: once printed, the copy generates reaction, sets agendas, and becomes fodder for further writing. News begets news about news, and the machine justifies itself. Authority arises not from knowledge but from the momentum of words already in circulation.

There is also a sly recognition of how thought emerges. Often one discovers what one thinks by writing. Kraus knew this, yet he draws a moral line. For artists or scholars, writing can be a path to clarity; for journalists beholden to commerce and speed, it too often becomes a substitute for clarity. The sentence therefore reads less as a blanket denial of journalistic value than as a warning: when output precedes insight, authority inflates emptiness. The public mistakes volume for importance, and language, pressed into service of haste and sensation, loses its capacity to name reality accurately. Kraus demands the inverse order: think rigorously, speak sparingly, and let form follow truth.