Justice & Law Quote by Karl Kraus

Scandal, Kraus suggests, isn’t the sin; it’s the spotlight. The line flips bourgeois morality on its head with a clean, malicious logic: an affair, a bribe, a private cruelty can hum along as background noise, socially metabolized and quietly forgiven, until authority arrives to name it. Only then does it become "a scandal" - not because the act changes, but because the story does. Kraus, the great Viennese demolitions expert, is less interested in wrongdoing than in the machinery that converts wrongdoing into public theater.

The intent is satirical, but also diagnostic. "Police" functions as shorthand for every legitimizing institution: courts, press, clergy, bureaucracy. Their intervention pretends to restore order, yet it manufactures the very outrage that proves their necessity. The subtext is that society doesn’t hate vice; it hates disruption. Scandal is a breach in the script of normalcy, and the police are stage managers who ensure the breach is framed, narrated, and monetized as moral drama.

Context matters: Kraus wrote in fin-de-siecle Vienna, where corruption, hypocrisy, and a sensation-hungry press were tangled together. He spent a career attacking newspapers for laundering gossip into righteousness and politics into entertainment. Read that way, the quote becomes a grim joke about power: enforcement doesn’t simply punish transgression; it defines which transgressions count. The scandal begins when the system needs it to begin.