Quotes By Karl Kraus

Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

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

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

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

Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.

Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.