Karl Kraus Quotes - Page 8

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

Anesthesia: wounds without pain. Neurasthenia: pain without wounds.

Many share my views with me. But I don't share them with them.

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

Morality is a burglar's tool whose merit lies in never being left behind at the scene of the crime.

Let my style capture all the sounds of my time. This should make it an annoyance to my contemporaries. But later generations should hold it to their ears like a seashell in which there is the music of an ocean of mud.

Parliamentarianism means putting political prostitution in barracks.

The agitator seizes the word. The artist is seized by it.

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

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

The pimp is the executive organ of immorality. The executive organ of morality is the blackmailer.

The truth is that the newspaper is not a place for information to be given, rather it is just hollow content, or more than that, a provoker of content. If it prints lies about atrocities, real atrocities are the result.

Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.

What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.

Contemporaries live from second hand to mouth.

Sexual enlightenment is that hardhearted process which for hygienic reasons forbids young people to satisfy their curiosity themselves.

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

A man's eroticism is a woman's sexuality.

It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.

My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire timeliness.

Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life.

Jealousy is a dog's bark which attracts thieves.

I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book. It's a misfortune that it is usually the other way round.

If one reads a newspaper only for information, one does not learn the truth, not even the truth about the paper. The truth is that the newspaper is not a statement of contents but the contents themselves; and more than that, it is an instigator.

I have to do this, as long as it is at all possible; for if those who are obliged to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.