A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.
– Karl Kraus
A man's eroticism is a woman's sexuality.
– Karl Kraus
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
– Karl Kraus
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
An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.
– Karl Kraus
Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?
– Karl Kraus
Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.
– Karl Kraus
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.
– Karl Kraus
Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.
– Karl Kraus
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.
– Karl Kraus
Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.
– Karl Kraus
Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
– Karl Kraus
Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.
– Karl Kraus
If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.
– Karl Kraus
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
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.
– Karl Kraus
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.
– Karl Kraus
Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.
– Karl Kraus
Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.
– Karl Kraus
My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.
– Karl Kraus
News reports stand up as people, and people wither into editorials. ClichTs walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot off.
– Karl Kraus
Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.
– Karl Kraus
Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.
– Karl Kraus
Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.
– Karl Kraus
The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.
– Karl Kraus
The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.
– Karl Kraus
The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.
– Karl Kraus
The press, that goiter of the world, swells up with the desire for conquest and bursts with the achievements which every day brings. A week has room for the boldest climax of the human drive for expansion.
– Karl Kraus
The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.
– Karl Kraus
This is something that I cannot get over - that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.
– Karl Kraus
War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.
– Karl Kraus
A weak man has doubts before a decision, a strong man has them afterwards.
– Karl Kraus
Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don't come into the world.
– Karl Kraus
Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.
– Karl Kraus
Jealousy is a dog's bark which attracts thieves.
– Karl Kraus
How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.
– Karl Kraus
Education is what most receive, many pass on, and few possess.