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Education
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Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
-Karl Kraus
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Envy / Jealousy
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A man
-Karl Kraus, originally published in Beim Wort genommen (1955). Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths, University of Chicago Press (1990) Trans. by Harry Zohn
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Experience
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Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.
-Karl Kraus
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Idealism
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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
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Ignorance & Stupidity
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Stupidity gets up early; that is why events are accustomed to happening in the morning.
-Karl Kraus
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Irony
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Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.
-Karl Kraus
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Morals
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The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.
-Karl Kraus
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Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.
-Karl Kraus, Morality and Criminal Justice, November, 1906
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Patriotism
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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.
-Karl Kraus
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Praise
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He who does without the praise of the crowd will not deny himself an opportunity to be his own adherent.
-Karl Kraus
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Psychiatry
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The difference between psychiatrists and other mentally disturbed people is something like the relationship between concave and convex madness.
-Karl Kraus
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Religion
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When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.
-Karl Kraus
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Sex
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Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.
-Karl Kraus
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Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don
-Karl Kraus, Trans. by Harry Zohn, originally published in Beim Wort genommen (1955). Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths, University of Chicago Press (1990)
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Sleep
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He who sleeps half a day has won half a life.
-Karl Kraus
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Solitude
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One's need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well.
-Karl Kraus
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War
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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
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War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
-Karl Kraus
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Books by and about Karl Kraus