Quotes from Carl Schmitt

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.

A world state which which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist. The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe.

Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.

When will we learn that childhood is in a great sense not simply a preparation for adult life but a thing unique and complete in itself—a masterpiece of God.

All genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.

The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.

Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.

Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.

Intelligence and rationalism are not in themselves revolutionary. But technical thinking is foreign to all social traditions: the machine has no tradition. One of Karl Marx's seminal sociological discoveries is that technology is the true revolutionary principle, beside which all revolutions based on natural law are antiquated forms of recreation. A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology.

The crisis of European jurisprudence began a century ago with the victory of legal positivism.

The most brazen humiliation ever inflicted upon God and mankind, justifying all the curses of the synagogue, is to be found in the 'sive' of the formula Deus sive Natura.

Legality has become a poisonous dagger, with which one party stabs the other in the back.

In the temporal sphere, the temptation to evil inherent in every power is certainly unceasing. Only in God is the conflict between power and good ultimately resolved. But the desire to escape this conflict by rejecting every earthly power would lead to the worst inhumanity.

The emptiness of mere majority calculus deprives legality of all persuasive power.

All genuine political theories presuppose man to be 'evil'.

The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing.

humanity, bestiality.

The essence and value of the law lies in its stability and durability (...), in its "relative eternity." Only then does the legislator's self-limitation and the independence of the law-bound judge find an anchor. The experiences of the French Revolution showed how an unleashed pouvoir législatif could generate a legislative orgy.

By claiming to be something more than the economic, the political is obliged to base itself on categories other than production and consumption. To repeat: it is curious that the capitalist entrepreneur and the socialist proletarian are of one accord in considering the political's assumption a presumption and, from the standpoint of their economic thinking, regarding the dominance of politicians as immaterial.

The principle of equal chance is of such sensitivity that any serious doubt about the loyalty of all participants already renders the principle's application impossible. For it is self-evident that one can hold open an equal chance only for those whom one is certain would do the same.

In general, it would be a peculiar type of 'justice' to declare a majority all the better and more just the more overwhelming it is, and to maintain abstractly that ninety-eight people abusing two persons is by far not so unjust as fifty-one people mistreating forty-nine. At this point, pure mathematics becomes simple inhumanity.

Norms are valid only for normal situations.