Karl Kraus Quotes

#1. An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best book I have seen on this engaging topic.

Istvan Deak

#2. I believe that the Welfare State redistributes poverty and reduces income. As Karl Kraus once said of psychoanalysis, the Welfare State is the disease which it purports to cure.

Arnold Kling

#3. Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.

Karl Kraus

#4. To be sure, the dog is loyal. But why, on that account, should we take him as an example? He is loyal to man, not to other dogs.

Karl Kraus

#5. Jealousy is a dog's bark which attracts thieves.

Karl Kraus

#6. If by day art is in the service of business, the evenings are devoted to the businessman's enjoyment of it. That is asking a lot of art, but art and the businessman make it work.

Karl Kraus

#7. What the teachers digest, the pupils eat.

Karl Kraus

#8. If children had been told that they could not blow their noses, this alone would make adults blush.

Karl Kraus

#9. Most people only do what they are asked to do; success comes to those who do a little more.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#11. The real truths are those that can be invented.

Karl Kraus

#12. A "seducer" who boasts of initiating women into the mystery of love is like a stranger who arrives at a railroad station and offers to show the sights to a tourist guide.

Karl Kraus

#13. 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

#14. Diplomacy is a game of chess in which the nations are checkmated.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#16. Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?

Karl Kraus

#17. 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

#18. What do people have against convicts? Is living together in the pen of freedom, where young people engage in mutual psychology, any more beautiful?

Karl Kraus

#19. If someone calls me vain and mean, I know that he trusts me and has something to confess to me.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#21. That an author takes a bow is not humility but presumption. What does the paleface want on the stage afterwards? But before the performance he had even less business there
and paying him royalties is equivalent to cheating the actors.

Karl Kraus

#22. Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

Karl Kraus

#23. The truth is that the newspaper is not a place for information to be given, rather it is just hollow content, or more than that, a provoker of content. If it prints lies about atrocities, real atrocities are the result.

Karl Kraus

#24. A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation.

Karl Kraus

#25. 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.

Karl Kraus

#26. Family life is an encroachment on private life.

Karl Kraus

#27. Many desire to kill me, and many wish to spend an hour chatting with me. The law protects me from the former.

Karl Kraus

#28. Let language be the divining rod that finds the sources of thought.

Karl Kraus

#29. Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.

Karl Kraus

#30. The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

Karl Kraus

#31. You don't even live once.

Karl Kraus

#32. I am not for women but against men.

Karl Kraus

#33. Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life.

Karl Kraus

#34. 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.

Karl Kraus

#35. Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

Karl Kraus

#36. Parliamentarianism means putting political prostitution in barracks.

Karl Kraus

#37. There is no more unhappy being under the sun than a fetishist who pines for a boot and has to content himself with an entire woman.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#39. Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.

Karl Kraus

#40. Ask your neighbor only about things you know better yourself. Then his advice could prove valuable.

Karl Kraus

#41. The difference between psychiatrists and other mentally disturbed people is something like the relationship between concave and convex madness.

Karl Kraus

#42. The extraordinary ability of a woman to forget is not the same as the talent of a lady not to be able to remember.

Karl Kraus

#43. The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#45. A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#47. Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.

Karl Kraus

#48. If something is stolen from you, don't go to the police. They're not interested. Don't go to a psychologist either, because he's interested in only one thing: that it was really you who did the stealing.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#50. The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#52. There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body; with the second, they match each other like body and clothes.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#55. Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.

Karl Kraus

#56. Why didn't Eternity have this deformed age aborted ? Its birthmark is the stamp of a newspaper, its medium is printer's ink, and in its veins flows ink.

Karl Kraus

#57. The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is to attribute art to mental weakness, and then to trace the weakness back to the point where, according to analytic dogma, it originated namely, the lavatory.

Karl Kraus

#58. A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

Karl Kraus

#59. An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

Karl Kraus

#60. One's need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well.

Karl Kraus

#61. Medicine: Your money and your life!

Karl Kraus

#62. My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire timeliness.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#65. How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#67. It is a mystery to me how a theologian can be praised for having brought himself to disbelieve dogmas. I've always thought that those who have brought themselves to believe in dogmas merit the true recognition owing a heroic deed.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#69. An artist should make concessions to the listener. That is why Bruckner dedicated one of his symphonies to the Good Lord.

Karl Kraus

#70. Immortality is the only thing which doesn't tolerate being postponed.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#72. Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#75. A cigar," said the altruist, "a cigar, my good man, I cannot give you. But any time you need a light, just come around; mine is always lit.

Karl Kraus

#76. Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#78. I master only the language of others. Mine does with me what it wants.

Karl Kraus

#79. To me it's still a greater miracle when a fly flies than when a human being undertakes to do so.

Karl Kraus

#80. How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.

Karl Kraus

#81. Religion, morality, and patriotism are feelings that are manifested only when they are outraged.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#83. A great deal of learning can be packed into an empty head.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#85. Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest.

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#87. A pun, though despicable in itself, can be the noblest vehicle of an artistic intention by serving as the abbreviation of a wittyview. It can be a social criticism in the form of an epigram.

Karl Kraus

#88. The new psychiatrists say that everything and anything can be traced back to sexual causes. Their method, for example, could be explained as the eroticism of father confessors.

Karl Kraus

#89. It so often happened to me that someone who shared my opinion kept the larger share for himself that I am now forewarned and offer people only ideas.

Karl Kraus

#90. Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustibility which keeps life from being impoverished. Let men learn to serve language.

Karl Kraus

#91. The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.

Karl Kraus

#92. 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.

Karl Kraus

#93. 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

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

Karl Kraus

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

Karl Kraus

#96. Morality is the tendency to pour out the baby with the bathwater.

Karl Kraus

#97. A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored.

Karl Kraus

#98. Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while washing them.

Karl Kraus

#99. In the theater one must sit in such a way that one sees the audience as a dark mass. Then it cannot bother one more than it does an actor. Nothing is more disturbing than being able to distinguish individuals in the crowd.

Karl Kraus

#100. Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain.

Karl Kraus