Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Kraus

Kraus doesn’t just rank vices here; he rigs the comparison to expose a society that loves condemning the visible sin while tolerating the systemic one. Prostitution is the perfect foil: publicly legible, easily policed, and tailor-made for moral outrage. Corruption, by contrast, often wears a suit, speaks in procedural language, and gets rebranded as “how things work.” Kraus flips the expected hierarchy to indict the audience’s selective disgust.

The line is built on scale. Prostitution “might” damage one person’s morals; corruption “invariably” corrupts the whole polity. That adverb does heavy lifting: it refuses the comforting idea that graft is an isolated bad actor. For Kraus, corruption is contagious because it rewrites the rules people live by. When bribery, patronage, and backroom favors become normal, morality stops being a private struggle and becomes a public nuisance. Citizens learn that virtue is for suckers, law is negotiable, and the common good is a cover story.

In Kraus’s Vienna, this wasn’t abstract. He wrote amid late Habsburg decadence and a press ecosystem he believed laundered power’s lies into respectable opinion. The subtext: a nation that obsesses over “cleanliness” in bedrooms while accepting filth in government is not prudish, it’s complicit. The real obscenity isn’t sex for money; it’s public trust for sale. Kraus’s genius is to make that complicity feel not just wrong but ridiculous.