Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.
Karl Kraus
Jealousy is a dog's bark which attracts thieves.
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.
A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.
Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.
Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.
When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human.' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.'
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.
There are people who can never forgive a beggar for their not having given him anything.
Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.
Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.
The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.
No ideas and the ability to express them - that's a journalist.
How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.
Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.
You'd be surprised how hard it can often be to translate an action into an idea.
A fine world in which man reproaches woman with fulfilling his heart's desire!
Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.
Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.
The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.
Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.
Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.
Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.
Curses on the law! Most of my fellow citizens are the sorry consequences of uncommitted abortions.
It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.
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.
Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.
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.
I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.
I don't like to meddle in my private affairs.
My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.
He who does without the praise of the crowd will not deny himself an opportunity to be his own adherent.
Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.
I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.
Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.
I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.
Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.
It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.
Education is what most receive, many pass on, and few possess.
Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.
To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.
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.
If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.
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.
An idea's birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.
Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.
