Karl Kraus

“Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.”

“The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.”

“Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.”

“I don't like to meddle in my private affairs.”

“I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.”

“Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.”

“Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.”

“Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.”

“My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.”

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

“Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.”

“Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.”

“Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.”

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

“Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.”

“The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.”