Karl Kraus

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.

Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.

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

Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.'

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

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

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.

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.

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

Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.

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

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

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

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

Jealousy is a dog's bark which attracts thieves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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