Quotes About Kant

All their Immanuel Kants together couldn't do it! It didn't enter the heads of all their Kants to build a system of scientific ethics, that is, ethics based on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.

But still, how could they write whole libraries about someone like Kant and hardly even notice Taylor-that prophet who could see ten centuries ahead?

We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to "renounce his personality," and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.

A wise man is free from passions, though Kant admits that, as the passions are so all-pervasive, we may have to search for this wise man in the moon.

And Törless could not think but that the problems of philosophy had been solved once and for all by Kant, rendering that a pointless pursuit, just as he also thought it was not worth writing poetry after Goethe and Schiller.

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

The fact that he was ashamed when he was discovered praying was for Kant an argument against prayer. He failed to see that prayer by its very nature is a matter for the strictest privacy, and he failed to perceive the fundamental significance of shame for human existence.

Kant does not seem to envisage that we are torn between two courses of action for moral reasons. He makes no provisions for genuine moral dilemmas, where no option is unambiguously right or all options are equally problematic.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant makes it quite clear that sympathetic feelings are often welcome, amiable, desirable, beautiful. They can under certain conditions be good objectively, all things considered. But they are not morally good (V 82.18–25). A happy, well-rounded character is an ideal that lies beyond the sphere of Kant's conception of morality.

Kant enjoyed the company of women (provided that they did not pretend to understand the Critique of Pure Reason) and

Our national jurisdictions are now bombarded by laws from outside, even though hardly any of these laws are concerned with the avoidance of war. We, the citizens, are powerless in the matter, and they, the legislators, entirely unanswerable to us, who must obey them. This is exactly what Kant dreaded, as the sure path, first to despotism and then to anarchy. The

The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more than by duty. His life, in consequence, was unremarkable. For Kant, the virtuous man is so much the master of his passions as scarcely to be prompted by them, and so far indifferent to power and reputation as to regard their significance as nothing beside that of duty itself.

Kant enjoyed the company of women (provided that they did not pretend to understand the Critique of Pure Reason)

This is how Kant explains the moral motive. When I ask myself not what I want to do, but what I ought to do, then I stand back from myself, and put myself in the position of an impartial judge.

Kant's position is extremely subtle – so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

Kant wishes to draw the limits of the understanding. If there are things that cannot be grasped by the understanding, then all assertions about them are meaningless.

So the knower whom Nietzsche has in mind has not, like Kant, the stark heaven above himself and to that one could say [also] the moral law within him, because he is beyond good and evil. But precisely because he is a knower in this sense he has a very exacting morality, a morality indeed beyond good and evil.

Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.

three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century. The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.)

An interest," writes Kant, "is present only in a dependent will which is not of itself always in accord with reason; in the divine will we cannot conceive of an interest.

It is Kant who made possible the sudden mushrooming of the Platonic collectivism in the modern world, and especially in Germany.

Kant is the first and greatest nihilist in the history of thought. A nihilist is one who works to destroy man's mind and values as an end in itself, for the sake of the destruction.

Kant did not preach Nazism. But, on a fundamental level and for the first time, he flung at Western man its precondition: "Du bist nichts" ("You are nothing").

For Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness.