Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Kraus

Kraus turns marriage into a two-word duel: meanness versus martyrdom. The line is engineered like a trap. “Matrimony,” a term with church-bell gravitas, arrives dressed for ceremony; “meanness” and “martyrdom” rip the veil off. That whiplash is the point. Kraus isn’t describing a bad marriage so much as skewering the cultural script that makes marriage a moral stage: one partner gets licensed to police, the other gets rewarded for suffering.

The phrasing is crucially asymmetrical. “Union” sounds neutral, even idealistic, but what’s being united isn’t affection or compatibility; it’s a set of roles. “Meanness” suggests the petty, daily sadism of control: small humiliations, moral bookkeeping, the right to correct. “Martyrdom” is the complementary vanity: pain converted into righteousness, endurance marketed as virtue. Put together, they create a closed economy where cruelty and self-sacrifice keep each other in business. No one has to admit they’re unhappy; they can call it character.

The context is Kraus’s Vienna: a bourgeois society obsessed with respectability, where institutions (press, church, state) mass-produced hypocrisy and called it order. As a satirist of public language, he’s also taking aim at the sentimental rhetoric that surrounds marriage. If the story told about matrimony is that it ennobles, Kraus answers with a darker mechanism: it weaponizes virtue, turning intimacy into a moral contest where someone must win by suffering and someone must win by making the suffering feel deserved.