"When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest."
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Quote collection
Karl Kraus quotes (page 2 of 14)
263 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws."
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"The world has become uglier since it began to look into a mirror every day; so let us settle for the mirror image and do without an inspection of the original."
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"How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print."
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"Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world."
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"Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust."
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"Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis."
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"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."
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"This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character."
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"Moral responsibility is what is lacking in a man when he demands it of a woman."
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"To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all."
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"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."
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"An illusion of depth often occurs if a blockhead is a muddlehead at the same time"
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"The unattractive thing about chauvinism is not so much the aversion to other nations as the love of one's own."
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"Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden."
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"A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation."
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"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."
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"Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave."
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"My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious."
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"Since the law prohibits the keeping of wild animals and I get no enjoyment from pets, I prefer to remain unmarried."
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