Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Kraus

Kraus skewers a world that pretends to run on morality while actually running on appetite. The line lands like a courtroom reversal: the man is both plaintiff and perpetrator, condemning the woman precisely for delivering what he privately demanded. That twist is the engine of Kraus's satire - not just hypocrisy, but hypocrisy with a self-cleaning alibi.

"Fine world" is doing heavy lifting. It's praise as poison, the civilized veneer that lets society congratulate itself while it stages ritual punishments. Kraus isn't interested in a private lovers' quarrel; he's diagnosing a public system where desire gets outsourced and then criminalized. The reproach isn't an accident of bad character, it's a feature: a culture that needs women to be the visible carriers of male longing, so men can preserve the fiction of restraint. She becomes the receipt for his impulses, proof that he "fell" rather than chose.

The subtext is sexual and legal at once. In fin-de-siecle Vienna - Kraus's stomping ground - respectability was a performance, and scandal was both entertainment and discipline. His writing repeatedly targeted the press, bourgeois pieties, and the way language sanitizes exploitation. Here, the sentence exposes how blame works as a social technology: desire is framed as female temptation, female availability, female fault. The man keeps his innocence by turning satisfaction into evidence against her.

It's a one-line anatomy of double standards, sharpened into a paradox: the very act of fulfilling a man's wish becomes the charge sheet. Kraus makes the injustice feel not tragic, but absurd - and that absurdity is the indictment.