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Quotes by Austrian Authors
"A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist."
"Religious doctrines are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them."
"The State does not govern the market; in the market in which products are exchanged it may quite possibly be a powerful party, but nevertheless it is only one party of many, nothing more than that. All its attempts to transform the exchange-ratios between economic goods that are determined in the market can only be undertaken with the instruments of the market."
"We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman."
"Rhetorical bombast, music and song resound, banners wave, flowers and colors serve as symbols, and the leaders seek to attach their followers to their own person. Liberalism has nothing to do with all this. It has no party flower and no party color, no party song and no party idols, no symbols and no slogans. It has the substance and the arguments. These must lead it to victory."
"More dangerous than bayonets and cannon are the weapons of the mind."
"Any intervention, such as that of the German Reichsbank in the Spring of 1923, in which only a small part of the increasing note-expansion was recovered by the banks through the sale of foreign bills, would necessarily be unsuccessful. Led by the idea of opposing speculation, inflationistic governments have allowed themselves to become involved in measures whose meaning is hardly intelligible. Thus at one time the importation of notes, then their exportation, then again both their exportation and importation, have been prohibited. Exporters have been forbidden to sell for their own country's notes, importers to buy with them."
"No sooner is it a little calmer with me than it is almost too calm as though I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."
"The elimination of profit, whatever methods may be resorted to for its execution, must transform society into a senseless jumble."
"A woman should soften but not weaken a man."
"I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind."
"Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock."
"Logic pervades the world the limits of the world are also the limits of logic."
"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."
"Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts."
"In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless."
"Determinants of prices have their effect only through the medium of the subjective estimates of individuals, and the extent to which any given factor influences these subjective estimates can never be predicted."
"We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay..., from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other."
"A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems, it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society."
"They no longer wanted to entice anyone, all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possible of the reflected glory in the great eyes of Odysseus."
"There can never be surprises in logic."
"It puzzled K., at least it puzzled him looking at it from the policemen's point of view, that they had made him go into the room and left him alone there, where he had ten different ways of killing himself. At the same time, though, he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point of view, what reason he could have to do so. Because those two were sitting there in the next room and had taken his breakfast, perhaps?"
"During my career several people have tried to push me out the door... Nobody has succeeded yet."
"The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not."
"A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa."
"How small a thought it takes to fill a life."
"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."
"We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself."
"It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves."
"There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy."
"The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide,lost in a forest remote from all human habitation."
"There is not the slightest analogy between playing games and the conduct of business within a market society. The card player wins money by outsmarting his antagonist. The businessman makes money by supplying customers with goods they want to acquire."
"The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition."
"A metallic money, the augmentation or diminution of the quantity of metal available for which is independent of deliberate human intervention, is becoming the modern monetary ideal. The significance of adherence to a metallic-money system lies in the freedom of the value of money from State influence that such a system guarantees."
"That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal, is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood - the time when he was his own ideal."
"He had probably been thrown out of a wine shop, and it hadn't quite dawned on him yet."
"Inflation made it possible to divert the fury of the people to 'speculators' and 'profiteers'. Thus it proved itself an excellent psychological resource of the destructive and annihilist war policy."
"Depreciation of money can benefit debtors only when it is unforeseen. If inflationary measures and a reduction of the value of money are expected, then those who lend money will demand higher interest in order to compensate their probable loss of capital, and those who seek loans will be prepared to pay the higher interest because they have a prospect of gaining on capital account."
"All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else."
"I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think."
"In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis."
"Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself."
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