Quotes from Karl Kraus

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

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

"A cigar," said the altruist, "a cigar, my good man, I cannot give you. But any time you need a light, just come around; mine is always lit."

It is the mission of the press to disseminate intellect and at the same time destroy receptivity to it.

A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time

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

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

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

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.

What do people have against convicts? Is living together in the pen of freedom, where young people engage in mutual psychology, any more beautiful?

Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest.

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

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

The tyranny of necessity grants its slaves three kinds of freedom: opinion free from intellect, entertainment free from art, and orgies free from love.

The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.

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

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

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

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

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

Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.

Hate must make a man productive. Otherwise one might as well love.

He who sleeps half a day has won half a life.

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