Top 200 Karl Kraus Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Through my satire I make little people so big that afterwards they are worthy objects of my satire and no one can reproach me any longer.”

— Karl Kraus

202. “Many desire to kill me, and many wish to spend an hour chatting with me. The law protects me from the former.”

— Karl Kraus

203. “Blushing, palpitations, a bad conscience – this is what you get if you haven’t sinned.”

— Karl Kraus

204. “To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.”

— Karl Kraus

205. “A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on non-alcoholic wine.”

— Karl Kraus

206. “In a well-run mental household there ought to be a thorough cleaning at the threshold of consciousness a few times a year.”

— Karl Kraus

207. “So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes – with the exception of their occupation.”

— Karl Kraus

208. “Contemporaries live from second hand to mouth.”

— Karl Kraus

209. “It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.”

— Karl Kraus

210. “Soldiers who don’t know what they’re fighting for know, nevertheless, what they’re not fighting for.”

— Karl Kraus

211. “Art is something that is so perfectly clear that no one comprehends it.”

— Karl Kraus

212. “It is regarded as normal to consecrate virginity in general and to lust for its destruction in particular.”

— Karl Kraus

213. “Satires which the censor can understand are justly forbidden.”

— Karl Kraus

214. “The little stations are very proud because the expresses have to pass them by.”

— Karl Kraus

215. “Ideas are transplanted by splitting, thoughts by sprouting.”

— Karl Kraus

216. “Who is going to cast out an error to which he has given birth and replace it with an adopted truth?”

— Karl Kraus

217. “A poem is good until one knows by whom it is.”

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

219. “Curses on the law! Most of my fellow citizens are the sorry consequences of uncommitted abortions.”

— Karl Kraus

220. “Most people are sick. But only a few know that this is something they can be proud of. These are the psychoanalysts.”

— Karl Kraus

221. “If children had been told that they could not blow their noses, this alone would make adults blush.”

— Karl Kraus

222. “Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor just wanted to see what it was like in there.”

— Karl Kraus

223. “The pimp is the executive organ of immorality. The executive organ of morality is the blackmailer.”

— Karl Kraus

224. “How powerful social mores are! Only a spider’s web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.”

— Karl Kraus

225. “I would have stage-fright if I had to speak with every one of the people before whom I speak.”

— Karl Kraus

226. “My respect for the inconsiderable is assuming gigantic dimensions.”

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

228. “There is a shortage of clerks. Everyone is going into journalism.”

— Karl Kraus

229. “Many share my views with me. But I don’t share them with them.”

— Karl Kraus

230. “When I want to go to sleep, I must first get a whole menagerie of voices to shut up. You wouldn’t believe what a racket they make in my room.”

— Karl Kraus

231. “There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for.”

— Karl Kraus

232. “I am not for women but against men.”

— Karl Kraus

233. “We are sacrificing ourselves for our ready-made goods; we are consumers and live in such a way that the means may consume the end.”

— Karl Kraus

234. “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.”

— Karl Kraus

235. “Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.”

— Karl Kraus

236. “Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.”

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

238. “To me it’s still a greater miracle when a fly flies than when a human being undertakes to do so.”

— Karl Kraus

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

— Karl Kraus

240. “The real truths are those that can be invented.”

— Karl Kraus

241. “What is a historian? Someone who doesn’t write well enough to work on a daily.”

— Karl Kraus

242. “When I read, it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting.”

— Karl Kraus

243. “Immortality is the only thing which doesn’t tolerate being postponed.”

— Karl Kraus

244. “The new psychiatrists say that everything and anything can be traced back to sexual causes. Their method, for example, could be explained as the eroticism of father confessors.”

— Karl Kraus

245. “Nowadays the thief cannot be distinguished from his victim. Neither has any valuable objects on him.”

— Karl Kraus

246. “Most people only do what they are asked to do; success comes to those who do a little more.”

— Karl Kraus

247. “A “seducer” who boasts of initiating women into the mystery of love is like a stranger who arrives at a railroad station and offers to show the sights to a tourist guide.”

— Karl Kraus

248. “An illusion of depth often occurs if a blockhead is a muddlehead at the same time.”

— Karl Kraus

249. “Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.”

— Karl Kraus