Kant Kant Right Quotes

For if the question is absurd in itself and demands unnecessary answers, then, besides the embarrassment of the one who proposes it, it also has the disadvantage of misleading the incautious listener into absurd answers, and presenting the ridiculous sight (as the ancients said) of one person milking a billy-goat while the other holds a sieve underneath. (A58/B82) ~ Immanuel Kant

Golden Rule has been rediscovered many times: by the authors of Leviticus and the Mahabharata; by Hillel, Jesus, and Confucius; by the Stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire; by social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke; and by moral philosophers such as Kant in his categorical imperative. ~ Steven Pinker

Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos. ~ Immanuel Kant

[A ruler is merely] the trustee of the rights of other men and he must always stand in dread of having in some way violated these rights. ~ Immanuel Kant

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me. ~ Immanuel Kant

A lie is the abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of the dignity by man. ~ Immanuel Kant

The character of the species, as it is indicated by the experience of all ages and all peoples, is this: that taken collectively (the human race as one whole), it is a multitude of persons, existing successively and side by side, who cannot do without associating peacefully and yet cannot avoid constantly offending one another. ~ Immanuel Kant

Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth. ~ Boris Pasternak

Nothing happens by blind chance. ~ Immanuel Kant

Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself. ~ Immanuel Kant

Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly. ~ Immanuel Kant

160Any change makes me apprehensive, even if it offers the greatest promise of improving my condition, and I am persuaded by this natural instinct of mine that I must take heed if I wish that the threads which the Fates spin so thin and weak in my case to be spun to any length. My great thanks, to my well-wishers and friends, who think so kindly of me as to undertake my welfare, but at the same time a most humble request to protect me in my current condition from any disturbance. ~ Immanuel Kant

Law And Freedom without Violence (Anarchy)
Law And Violence without Freedom (Despotism)
Violence without Freedom And Law (Barbarism)
Violence with Freedom And Law (Republic) ~ Immanuel Kant

The world will by no means perish by a diminution in the number of evil men. ~ Immanuel Kant

If justice perishes, then it is no longer worthwhile for men to live upon the earth. ~ Immanuel Kant

Kant argued that, where nature could be considered beautiful in her acts of destruction, human violence appeared instead as monstrous. However, a misreading of Kant in Romantic philosophy led to the idealization of the murderer as a sublime genius that has colored constructions of that criminal figure ever since. ~ Richard Marshall

Thus we find that the unconditioned condition of the goodness of anything is rational nature...To play this role, however, rational nature must itself be something of unconditional value--and end in itself. ~ Christine M. Korsgaard

Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law. ~ Immanuel Kant

For how is it possible, says that acute man, that when a concept is given me, I can go beyond it and connect with it another which is not contained in it, in such a manner as if that latter necessarily belonged to the former? ~ Immanuel Kant

The death of dogma is the birth of morality. ~ Immanuel Kant

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. ~ Will Durant

The sight of a being who is not adorned with a single feature of a pure and good will, enjoying unbroken prosperity, can never give pleasure to an impartial rational spectator. Thus a good will appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of being worthy of happiness. ~ Immanuel Kant

I express the principle of one's freedom as a human being in this formula: No one can compel me (in accordance with his beliefs about the welfare of others) to be happy after his fashion. ~ Immanuel Kant

Under a nonrepublican constitution, where subjects are not citizens, the easiest thing in the world to do is to declare war. Here the ruler is not a fellow citizen, but the nation's owner, and war does not affect his table, his hunt, his places of pleasure, his court festivals, and so on. Thus, he can decide to go to war for the most meaningless of reasons, as if it were a kind of pleasure party... ~ Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant is credited with saying, "If the stars came out only once in a lifetime, we'd stay up all that night." Now we stay up late in Plato's cave just to watch the enervated stars on The Tonight Show. ~ William J. O'Malley

Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, 'War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.' ~ Immanuel Kant

Unless people are convinced about what you are asking them to do, they are not going to make it happen. ~ Ravi Kant

What might be said of things in themselves, separated from all relationship to our senses, remains for us absolutely unknown ~ Immanuel Kant

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. ... 1 Nothing is required for this enlightenment ... except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters. - IMMANUEL KANT, What Is Enlightenment? ~ Jon Meacham

April 26 - I know I shouldn't hang around the college when I'm through at the lab, but seeing the young men and women going back and forth carrying books and hearing them talk about all the things they're learning in their classes excites me. I wish I could sit and talk with them over coffee in the Campus Bowl Luncheonette when they get together to argue about books and politics and ideas. It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy - about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind. Sometimes I listen in on the conversations at the tables around me, and pretend I'm a college student, even though I'm a lot older than they are. I carry books around, and I've started to smoke a pipe. It's silly, but since I belong at the lab I feel as if I'm a part of the university. I hate to go home to that lonely room. ~ Daniel Keyes

I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. ~ Immanuel Kant

Sometimes there is a single moment that changes your life forever. After that moment nothing feels the same anymore. You try to get back into your normal routine, but something is different, something's changed. Finally, you realize that everything is just the same as it always was. The only thing different is you. Hadie, you are that moment, and you have changed me. Forever. ~ Komal Kant

The whole interest of my reason, whether speculative or practical, is concentrated in the three following questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? (Critique of Pure Reason ~ Immanuel Kant

Natural science physics contains in itself synthetical judgments a priori, as principles ... Space then is a necessary representation a priori, which serves for the foundation of all external intuitions. ~ Immanuel Kant

There is a limit where the intellect fails and breaks down, and this limit is where the questions concerning God and freewill and immortality arise. ~ Immanuel Kant

...[R]eason of itself, independent on all experience, ordains what ought to take place, that accordingly actions of which perhaps the world has hitherto never given an example, the feasibility even if which might be very much doubted by one who founds everything on experience, are nevertheless inflexibly commanded by reason; that, for example, even though there might never yet have been a sincere friend, yet not a whit the less is pure sincerity in friendship required of every man... ~ Immanuel Kant

French philosopher whom professional philosophers generally accord highest honors is Descartes. Montaigne and Pascal, Voltaire and Rousseau, Bergson and Sartre do not enjoy their greatest vogue among philosophers, and of these only Rousseau has had any considerable influence on the history of philosophy (through Kant and Hegel). ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I am not a Kant expert and no Kantian but, I should say, a Kant sympathizer - especially where conflicts between Kantian and so-called historicist thinking are concerned, both in epistemology and in ethics. ~ Leszek Kolakowski

Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses. ~ Immanuel Kant