Parenting & Family Quote by Karl Kraus

Kraus flips the usual coming-of-age story into a diagnosis: maturity is not progress, its a kind of arrest. The line runs on a neat, nasty paradox. The child, supposedly naive, is the one forced into compromise. He "learns" to discard his ideals - not because reality enlightens him, but because society trains him out of inconvenient purity. Meanwhile the adult, who should have outgrown childishness, "never wears out his short pants": he keeps the costume of boyhood, the habits of dependency, vanity, and cowardice, just tailored in adult cloth.

The bite is in the mismatch between inner life and outward status. Kraus mocks the culture that congratulates itself on "practicality" while rewarding adults who behave like overgrown children: eager for approval, allergic to responsibility, hungry for spectacle. The short pants image is deliberately petty, even faintly humiliating. Its not a heroic metaphor; its playground-level ridicule aimed at bourgeois self-importance.

Context matters because Kraus made a career of treating public language as a crime scene. In fin-de-siecle and interwar Vienna - a world of rotting imperial prestige, press manipulation, and moral posturing - "ideals" were often what got sacrificed first. The adult who refuses to outgrow his short pants is also the citizen who refuses to grow up politically: he wants authority without accountability. Kraus' intent isnt to sentimentalize childhood. Its to accuse adulthood of becoming a social alibi for perpetual immaturity.