Wit & Attitude Quote by Karl Kraus

Kraus doesn’t just mistrust education; he mistrusts what polite society does with it. Calling education a “crutch” flips the usual moral hierarchy. It’s not a ladder to enlightenment but a prop for the insecure, a device that lets the “foolish” hobble into arguments they can’t actually walk through. The insult is aimed less at learning than at credentialed performance: people using the aura of schooling to bludgeon anyone who won’t submit to their approved vocabulary, citations, and institutional stamps.

The line’s real bite is in “attack the wise.” Kraus imagines wisdom as something lived and earned - messy, experiential, often skeptical of official narratives. Education, by contrast, becomes a social weapon: the educated fool doesn’t seek truth, they seek status. They don’t ask questions; they prosecute. “To prove that they are not idiots” nails the psychological engine: education as defensive posture, an anxious alibi. You collect diplomas the way you collect armor, not to explore the world but to avoid being exposed.

Context matters. Kraus wrote in fin-de-siecle Vienna, a culture drunk on respectability, titles, and bureaucratic correctness, while he made a career skewering journalism, hypocrisy, and the way language gets used to launder power. His target isn’t the classroom so much as the public sphere where schooling becomes moral authority. It’s a warning that institutions can manufacture confidence faster than they manufacture judgment - and that the loudest gatekeepers of “intelligence” are often advertising their fear of being found out.