Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Kraus

The joke lands because it flips the sanctimony of privacy into a confession of duplicity. “I don’t like to meddle” is the language of civility, the pose of the well-bred citizen who knows to mind his business. Kraus grafts that polite refrain onto “my private affairs,” turning selfhood into a foreign jurisdiction. The speaker isn’t protecting intimacy; he’s disowning it. Private life becomes a case file you’d rather not open, because opening it would mean culpability, contradiction, maybe disgust.

That inversion is pure Kraus: a satirist who treated public language as the real crime scene. In fin-de-siecle Vienna, where newspapers manufactured consensus and hypocrisy came dressed as etiquette, “privacy” wasn’t just a right; it was a rhetorical shield. Kraus pricks the shield by suggesting the most aggressive meddler in your life is you - your rationalizations, your moral bookkeeping, your ability to launder motives through respectable phrases.

The line also needles the bourgeois fantasy that a clean boundary exists between the public person and the private self. If you won’t “meddle” in your own affairs, you’re outsourcing judgment to appearances, letting society’s scripts do the thinking. It’s a one-sentence diagnosis of modern avoidance: the fear that honest self-scrutiny is indecent, intrusive, or simply bad for business.

Kraus makes the private sphere sound like a scandal sheet, and the scandal is that we prefer not to read it.