“Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.”
― Karl Kraus
“Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.”
― Karl Kraus
“Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.”
― Karl Kraus
“Jealousy is a dog’s bark which attracts thieves.”
― Karl Kraus
“Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.”
― Karl Kraus
“There are people who can never forgive a beggar for their not having given him anything.”
― Karl Kraus
“Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.”
― Karl Kraus
“Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.”
― Karl Kraus
“Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.”
― Karl Kraus
“My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.”
― Karl Kraus
“Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?”
― Karl Kraus
“How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.”
― Karl Kraus
“If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.”
― Karl Kraus
“Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone’s slave.”
― Karl Kraus
“Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.”
― Karl Kraus
“A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.”
― Karl Kraus
“Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.”
― Karl Kraus
“He who does without the praise of the crowd will not deny himself an opportunity to be his own adherent.”
― Karl Kraus
“Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.”
― Karl Kraus
“Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.”
― Karl Kraus
“I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.”
― Karl Kraus
“Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.”
― Karl Kraus
“Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don’t come into the world.”
― Karl Kraus
“Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.”
― Karl Kraus
“A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.”
― Karl Kraus
“Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.”
― Karl Kraus
“Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.”
― Karl Kraus
“It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.”
― Karl Kraus
“Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.”
― Karl Kraus
“Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.”
― Karl Kraus
“The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.”
― Karl Kraus
“The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.”
― Karl Kraus
“A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.”
― Karl Kraus
“Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.”
― Karl Kraus
“Education is what most receive, many pass on, and few possess.”
― Karl Kraus
“No ideas and the ability to express them – that’s a journalist.”
― Karl Kraus
“Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.”
― Karl Kraus
“You’d be surprised how hard it can often be to translate an action into an idea.”
― Karl Kraus
“Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.”
― Karl Kraus
“The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.”
― Karl Kraus
“I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.”
― Karl Kraus
“Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.”
― Karl Kraus
“To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.”
― Karl Kraus
“The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.”
― Karl Kraus
“Curses on the law! Most of my fellow citizens are the sorry consequences of uncommitted abortions.”
― Karl Kraus
“When a man is treated like a beast, he says, ‘After all, I’m human.’ When he behaves like a beast, he says ‘After all, I’m only human.’”
― Karl Kraus
“It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.”
― Karl Kraus
“I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.”
― Karl Kraus
“There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman’s shoe and has to settle for the whole woman.”
― Karl Kraus
“I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.”
― Karl Kraus
“I don’t like to meddle in my private affairs.”
― Karl Kraus
“An idea’s birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.”
― Karl Kraus
“Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.”
― Karl Kraus
“A fine world in which man reproaches woman with fulfilling his heart’s desire!”
― Karl Kraus
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