Karl Kraus
22 quotations
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.
Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
A man's eroticism is a woman's sexuality.
Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.
If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.
Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.
An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.
Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?
Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.
The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.
The psychoanalysts pick our dreams as if they were our pockets.
When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.
Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.
Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.
Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.
He who sleeps half a day has won half a life.
Stupidity gets up early; that is why events are accustomed to happening in the morning.
The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.
Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.