Quotes from Karl Kraus

Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don't come into the world.

News reports stand up as people, and people wither into editorials. Clichés walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot off.

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

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

I am not for women but against men.

The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes man.

Since the day man first tried to conquer space, the earth has been mobilizing.

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

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

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

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

On the stage one must not confuse the nature of a personality with the naturalness of a person.

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.

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

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

Humanity is the washerwoman of society that wrings out its dirty laundry in tears.

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

Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.

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

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.

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

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

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

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