Karl Kraus may refer to:
The agitator seizes the word. The artist is seized by it.
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.
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.
The triumph of morality: A thief who has broken into a bedroom claims his sense of shame had been outraged, and by threatening theoccupants with exposure of an immoral act he blackmails them into not bringing charges for burglary.
Education is what most receive, many pass on, and few possess.
Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.
Psychology is a bus that accompanies an airplane.
Humanity is the washerwoman of society that wrings out its dirty laundry in tears.
Nowadays the thief cannot be distinguished from his victim. Neither has any valuable objects on him.
Ideas are transplanted by splitting, thoughts by sprouting.
The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.
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.
I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.
The psychoanalysts pick our dreams as if they were our pockets.
A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on non-alcoholic wine.
Moral responsibility is what is lacking in a man when he demands it of a woman.
A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation.
To have no ideas and being able to express them is the essence of journalism.
The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on.
Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.