Karl Kraus Quotations

There are people who can never forgive a beggar for their not having given him anything.

Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.

Jealousy is a dog's bark which attracts thieves.

The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don't come into the world.

Curses on the law! Most of my fellow citizens are the sorry consequences of uncommitted abortions.

Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.

Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

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.

Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.

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.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.

I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.

Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.

No ideas and the ability to express them - that's a journalist.

If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.

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.

Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.

Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.

The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

You'd be surprised how hard it can often be to translate an action into an idea.

Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.

I don't like to meddle in my private affairs.

To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.

Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.

My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.

Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?

Education is what most receive, many pass on, and few possess.

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.

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.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

A fine world in which man reproaches woman with fulfilling his heart's desire!

Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.

He who does without the praise of the crowd will not deny himself an opportunity to be his own adherent.

I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.

It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.

Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.

Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.

A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.

An idea's birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.

Love between sexes is a sin in theology, a forbidden intercourse in jurisprudence, a mechanical insult in medicine, and a subject philosophy has no time for.

News reports stand up as people, and people wither into editorials. ClichTs walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot off.

The agitator seizes the world. The artist is seized by it.

You would be surprised how hard it often is to translate an action into thought

Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein.

There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for.

A healthy man is content with a woman. An erotic man is content with a stocking to get to a woman. A sick man is content with thestocking.

I knew a man who carried his education in his vest pocket because there was more room there than in his head.

Since the law prohibits the keeping of wild animals and I get no enjoyment from pets, I prefer to remain unmarried.

I trim my opponents to fit my arrows.

Barbershop conversations are irrefutable proof that heads exist for the sake of hair.

The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature.

Technology is a servant who makes so much noise cleaning up in the next room that his master cannot make music.

On the stage one must not confuse the nature of a personality with the naturalness of a person.

The art of an actress is sublimated sexuality. But off the stage the fire must be able to reconvert the steam into body.

Most people are sick. But only a few know that this is something they can be proud of. These are the psychoanalysts.

What the teachers digest, the pupils eat.

A comprehensive education is a well-stocked pharmacy: but we have no assurance that potassium cyanide will not be administered fora head cold.

I can say with pride that I have spent days and nights not reading anything, and that with unflagging energy I use every moment toacquire gradually an encyclopedic lack of education.

Humanity and bestiality: when will the former finally be uttered with the flavor of hate and the latter with the flavor of love? Does a lion tear his fellow lion to pieces?

Parliamentarianism means putting political prostitution in barracks.

A snob is unreliable. The work he praises might just be good.

Contemporaries live from second hand to mouth.

The pimp is the executive organ of immorality. The executive organ of morality is the blackmailer.

They judge lest they be judged.

Morality is a burglar's tool whose merit lies in never being left behind at the scene of the crime.

It is the mission of the press to disseminate intellect and at the same time destroy receptivity to it.

The triumph of morality: A thief who has broken into a bedroom claims his sense of shame had been outraged, and by threatening theoccupants with exposure of an immoral act he blackmails them into not bringing charges for burglary.

Let my style capture all the sounds of my time. This should make it an annoyance to my contemporaries. But later generations should hold it to their ears like a seashell in which there is the music of an ocean of mud.

There is a shortage of clerks. Everyone is going into journalism.

I have often been asked to be fair and view a matter from all sides. I did so, hoping that something might improve if I viewed allsides of it. But the result was the same. So I went back to viewing things only from one side, which saves me a lot of work and disappointment. For it is comforting to regard something as bad and to be able to use one's prejudice as an excuse.

One cleans someone else's threshold of consciousness only if one's own home is dirty.

The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes man.

One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.

The unattractive thing about chauvinism is not so much the aversion to other nations as the love of one's own.

A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.

A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on non-alcoholic wine.

Insights into erotic life belong to art, not education. But sometimes these have to be spelled out for the illiterates. And it ismainly a matter of convincing the illiterates, for they are the ones who write the penal code.

Humanity is the washerwoman of society that wrings out its dirty laundry in tears.

Family life is an encroachment on private life.

I have decided many a stylistic problem first by my head, then by heads or tails.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

The tyranny of necessity grants its slaves three kinds of freedom: opinion free from intellect, entertainment free from art, and orgies free from love.

We are sacrificing ourselves for our ready-made goods; we are consumers and live in such a way that the means may consume the end.

What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.

If one reads a newspaper only for information, one does not learn the truth, not even the truth about the paper. The truth is that the newspaper is not a statement of contents but the contents themselves; and more than that, it is an instigator.