Quotes from Carl Schmitt

The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.

Without wanting to decide the question of the nature of man one may say in general that as long as man is well off or willing to put up with things, he prefers the illusion of an undisturbed calm and does not endure pessimists. The political adversaries of a clear political theory will, therefore, easily refute political phenomena and truths in the name of some autonomous discipline as amoral, uneconomical, unscientific and above all else declare this- a devilry worthy of being combated.

What did they live on," said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking. "They lived on treacle," said the Dormouse, after thinking a moment or two. "They couldn't have done that, you know," Alice gently remarked. "They'd have been ill." "So they were," said the Dormouse, "very ill." Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

The modern partisan expects neither law nor mercy from the enemy.

The partisan is still the one who refuses to carry weapons openly, who fights from ambush, and who uses the enemy's uniform, as well as true or false insignias and every type of civilian clothing as camouflage. Secrecy and darkness are his strongest weapons...

The basic outline of the philosophy of the Buribunks: I think, therefore I am; I speak therefore I am; I write, therefore I am; I publish therefore I am.

An historical truth is only true once

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.

The remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis [is] that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.

State and politics cannot be exterminated. . . For the application of such means, a new and essentially pacifist vocabulary has been created. War is condemned but executions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of treaties, international police, and measure to assure peace remain. The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity.

Der Feind ist unsere eigene Frage als Gestalt.

True law is not imposed; it arises from unintentional developments. (...)Law emerges (...) as something not merely legislated but given. The later positivism knows no origin and has no home. It recognizes only causes or basic norms. It seeks to be the opposite of "unintended" law. Its ultimate goal is control and calculability.

The understanding of every type of representation disappears with the spread of economic thinking.

All that can justify killing is 'an existential threat to one's own way of life. . . . To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy.

Jacobins defamed the classical, purely military war among states that had developed in the 18th century. They claimed that it was a "museum piece" of the ancien régime, and rejected, as the work of tyrants and despots, the liquidation of civil war and the bracketing of foreign war that the state had achieved. They replaced purely state war with national war and the democratic levée en masse [mass uprising].

Without sense of contradiction, for example, once can today consider a dissolution of the Reichstag 'strictly legal,' even though it is, in fact, a coup d'etat, and, vice versa, a parliamentary dissolution might substantively conform to the spirit of the constitution, and yet not be legal. Such antitheses document the breakdown of a system of legality, which ends in a formalism and functionalism without substance or reference points.

The preexisting and presumed congruence and harmony of law and statute, justice and legality, substance and process dominated every detail of the legal thinking of the legislative state. Only through the acceptance of these parings was it possible to subordinate oneself to the rule of law precisely in the name of freedom.

An unconditional equivalence of law with the results of any particular formal process, therefore, would only be blind subordination to the pure decision of the offices entrusted with lawmaking, in other words, a decision detached from every substantive relation to law and justice, and, consequently, an unconditional renunciation of any resistance.

If the assumptions underlying the legislative state of the parliamentary-democratic variety are no longer tenable, then closing one's eyes to the concrete constitutional situation and clinging to an absolute, 'value-neutral,' functionalist and formal concept of law, in order to save the system of legality, is not far off. The 'law,' then, is only the present decision of the momentary parliamentary majority.

Since God actually became visible man, no visible man should leave the visible world to its own devices.

If the parliamentary legislative state typically permits a 'state of exception' with the suspension of basic rights, its intention is not to render the special commissioner equivalent with the legislature or the special commissioner's decrees equivalent with statutes, but to create the freedom to issues measures that are necessary and effective.