Quotes By Karl Kraus

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

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

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.

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

Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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