Karl Kraus Quotes

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

Many a man renounces morals, but with great difficulty the conception, 'morality.' Morality is the 'idea' of morals, their intellectual power, their power over the conscience; on the other hand, morals are too material to rule the mind, and do not fetter an 'intellectual' man, a so-called independent, a 'freethinker.'

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

The foundations of morality are like all other foundations: If you dig too much about them, the superstructure will come tumbling down.

There is Moral Sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the Immoral Sense enables up to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it.

The quest for riches darkens the sense of right and wrong.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

I think evil is very relative.

Modern morality is all about perception.

Bad company corrupts good character.

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

Morality is the weakness of the brain.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

I try not to do anything that's immoral.

Some things must be good in themselves, else there could be no measure whereby to lay out good and evil.

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.

What we call “morals” is simply blind obedience to words of command.

Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

That which is morally wrong will never be politically right.