Pulchrum est paucorum hominum.
"An explanation is needed only at the point where, in my desperation to escape the machine, I said that I preferred an already fully dehumanized zone to that beauty-smitten thing that resisted the relentless march of progress with the leftover wreckage of humankind. The anti-thesis, now broken open by the war, was resolved in later aphorisms in favor of precisely the latter life-form, as the one with a yearning for life and for form, which, on account of just such a yearning, and of self-preservative instinct as well, was obliged to undertake emergency defense against the tyranny of valueless utility, according to which life is finished products and culture trappings...
Faced with the imperfection of life, he affirms the substitute for life; faced with half-individuals, he affirms the patented system for avoiding personalities entirely. The person who helps himself to the machine is rewarded to the same extent that the people who help the machine are impoverished. Because the latter doesn't liberate a person but makes him its slave, it brings him not to himself but under artillery fire...
The phrase "beauty mongers from Paris to Palermo" may now apply to that horde of educated Huns who bear the blame for transforming the values of life into tourist attractions. The thinking here about language and human beings is more akin to the type who can laze around in the sun, wallowing in deeper aimlessness, than to the insufferable conqueror of a place in the sun, with whose way of thinking it was of course keeping to ornamentally dishonor a more colorful existence and thereby beautify its own downfall. In that consecrated state of mind, which desires "basalt-free" orderliness and utility truly only for the higher purpose of tending to the castles and marvels of the soul without being disturbed, I had no choice but to prefer the company of commercial scum like that, because they provided the best instruments for securing respite from a noisy world in which, only because they were no longer human beings, they themselves could no longer disturb me. The other did, however, because they were half-human." - Karl Kraus, Between Two Strains of Life (1917)