Karl kraus quotes

One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis.

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

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

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

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

Lord, forgive them, for they know what they do!

The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.

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.

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.

Nationalism is the love which ties me to the blockheads of my country, to the insultors of my way of life, and to the desecrators of my language.

A poem is good until one knows by whom it is.

How do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read.

When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.

I have drawn from the well of language many a thought which I do not have and which I could not put into words.

We are sacrificing ourselves for our ready-made goods; we are consumers and live in such a way that the means may consume the end.

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

To have no ideas and being able to express them is the essence of journalism.

It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half.

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

It is uplifting to lose one?s faith in a reality which looks the way it is described in a newspaper.

Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.

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.

A weak man has doubts before a decision; a strong man has them afterwards.

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

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.

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

In Berlin, things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.

My respect for the inconsiderable is assuming gigantic dimensions.

Cosmetics is the science of a woman's cosmos.

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.

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

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

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

Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought.

The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature.

Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.

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.

Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.

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

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.

I have often been asked to be fair and view a matter from all sides. I did so, hoping that something might improve if I viewed allsides of it. But the result was the same. So I went back to viewing things only from one side, which saves me a lot of work and disappointment. For it is comforting to regard something as bad and to be able to use one's prejudice as an excuse.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

A white lie is always pardonable. But he who tells the truth without compulsion merits no leniency.

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

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

Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.

Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor just wanted to see what it was like in there.

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

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

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.

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

Penalties serve to deter those who are not inclined to commit any crimes.

Love thy neighbor as thyself. Because each of us is his own neighbor.

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.

What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.

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

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

An illusion of depth often occurs if a blockhead is a muddlehead at the same time

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

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

The blind won't admit that I have eyes in my head, and the deaf say that I'm dumb.

So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes--with the exception of their occupation.

You don't even live once.

I knew a man who carried his education in his vest pocket because there was more room there than in his head.

Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.

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

Family life is an encroachment on private life.

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

There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.

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

One must read all writers twice--the good as well as the bad. The one kind will be recognized; the other, unmasked.

Art is something that is so perfectly clear that no one comprehends it.

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

Sound opinions are valueless. What matters is who holds them.

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

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

What the teachers digest, the pupils eat.

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.

It is regarded as normal to consecrate virginity in general and to lust for its destruction in particular.

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

Moral responsibility is what is lacking in a man when he demands it of a woman.

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

Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure

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

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

Since the law prohibits the keeping of wild animals and I get no enjoyment from pets, I prefer to remain unmarried.

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

Many women would like to dream with men without sleeping with them. Someone should point out to them that this is utterly impossible.

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

When I want to go to sleep, I must first get a whole menagerie of voices to shut up. You wouldn't believe what a racket they make in my room.

Humanity and bestiality: when will the former finally be uttered with the flavor of hate and the latter with the flavor of love? Does a lion tear his fellow lion to pieces?

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

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

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.

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

Psychology is a bus that accompanies an airplane.

Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.

My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

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

Who is going to cast out an error to which he has given birth and replace it with an adopted truth?

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

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

The heroes of obtrusiveness, people with whom no soldier would lie down in the trenches, though he has to submit to being interviewed by them, break into recently abandoned royal castles so that they can report, "We got there first!" It would be far less shameful to be paid for committing atrocities than for fabricating them.

Medicine: "Your money and your life!

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

Technology is a servant who makes so much noise cleaning up in the next room that his master cannot make music.

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.

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

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

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

One cleans someone else's threshold of consciousness only if one's own home is dirty.

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

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

There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for.

It is not true that one cannot live without a woman. It is simply that one cannot have lived without one.

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

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

Barbershop conversations are irrefutable proof that heads exist for the sake of hair.

In case of doubt, decide in favor of what is correct.

I trim my opponents to fit my arrows.

Stupidity gets up early; that is why events are accustomed to happening in the morning.

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

The world has become uglier since it began to look into a mirror every day; so let us settle for the mirror image and do without an inspection of the original.

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation.