"I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear."
Read quote
14 likes
Quote collection
Karl Kraus quotes (page 3 of 14)
263 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman's shoe and has to settle for the whole woman."
Read quote
13 likes
"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."
Read quote
13 likes
"A white lie is always pardonable. But he who tells the truth without compulsion merits no leniency."
Read quote
13 likes
"Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots."
Read quote
13 likes
"How do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read."
Read quote
13 likes
"It is not true that one cannot live without a woman. It is simply that one cannot have lived without one."
Read quote
12 likes
"The heroes of obtrusiveness, people with whom no soldier would lie down in the trenches, though he has to submit to being interviewed by them, break into recently abandoned royal castles so that they can report, "We got there first!" It would be far less shameful to be paid for committing atrocities than for fabricating them."
Read quote
11 likes
"My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin."
Read quote
11 likes
"In Berlin, things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious."
Read quote
11 likes
"I can say with pride that I have spent days and nights not reading anything, and that with unflagging energy I use every moment toacquire gradually an encyclopedic lack of education."
Read quote
11 likes
"He who sleeps half a day has won half a life."
Read quote
11 likes
"A healthy man is content with a woman. An erotic man is content with a stocking to get to a woman. A sick man is content with thestocking."
Read quote
10 likes
"Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom."
Read quote
10 likes
"The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span."
Read quote
10 likes
"The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women."
Read quote
10 likes
"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."
Read quote
10 likes
"Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?"
Read quote
10 likes
"One's need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well."
Read quote
10 likes
"Stupidity gets up early; that is why events are accustomed to happening in the morning."
Read quote
9 likes