Quotes by Karl Kraus

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