Justice & Law Quote by Karl Kraus

Kraus doesn’t lob profanity at “the law” to sound rebellious; he does it to expose how law launders cruelty into legitimacy. The line is engineered as a double offense. First, it curses the legal order as a moral failure. Then it commits a deeper social blasphemy: it treats “most of my fellow citizens” as the tragic residue of choices that were denied, postponed, or policed. The shock isn’t incidental; it’s his instrument. Kraus forces the reader to feel the violence of a society that compels births while refusing to take responsibility for the lives it produces.

The subtext is less about abortion as policy than about hypocrisy as governance. In early 20th-century Vienna, Kraus watched bourgeois respectability coexist with wartime propaganda, sexual double standards, and punitive moral legislation. He frames unwanted life as a political artifact: a population manufactured by coercion and then judged for its misery. The phrase “uncommitted abortions” is a deliberately ugly paradox, implying a prevented decision - agency withheld. It indicts not individuals but a culture that turns private desperation into public destiny.

Kraus’s wit is venomous because it flips the usual moral hierarchy. Instead of treating abortion as the scandal, he casts compulsory motherhood, legalistic piety, and civic complacency as the scandal. The target is the complacent “citizen,” a figure Kraus often treats as the willing consumer of lies. It’s misanthropy with a purpose: to make sentimentality impossible, so accountability can begin.