Quotes from Immanuel Kant

What is more, we cannot do morality a worse service than by seeing to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first itself be judged by moral principles in order to decide if it is fit to serve as an original example...even the Holy One of the gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize him to be such.

by saying that the former was only concerned with quality, the latter only with quantity, mistook cause for effect.

Phantasie ist unser guter Genius oder unser Dämon.

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

Hence we may at once dismiss as easily foreseen but futile objection, "that by our admitting the ideality of space and of time the whole sensible world would be turned into mere illusion.

Ethical laws cannot be thought of as emanating originally merely from the will of this superior being as statutes, which, had he not first commanded them, would perhaps not be binding, for then they would not be ethical laws and the duty proper to them would not be the free duty of virtue but the coercive duty of law.

Thinking is conversation with oneself.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.

Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass

Human reason goes forth inexorably to such questions as cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason or principles based on it.

Faulheit und Feigheit sind die Ursachen, warum ein so großer Teil der Menschen, nachdem sie die Natur längst von fremder Leitung frei gesprochen, dennoch gerne zeitlebens unmündig bleiben; und warum es anderen so leicht wird, sich zu deren Vormündern aufzuwerfen.

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law

the cultivation of reason leads humanity sooner to misery than happiness

It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will.

Dogmatism is thus the dogmatic procedure of pure reason without previous criticism of its own powers, and in opposing this procedure, we must not be supposed to lend any countenance to that loquacious shallowness which arrogates to itself the name of popularity, nor

The history of nature . . . begins with good, for it is God's work; the history of freedom begins with badness, for it is man's work.

Une politique valable ne peut faire un pas sans rendre hommage à la morale.

Now I say: man and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will, but in all his actions, whether they concern himself or other rational beings, must always be regarded at the same time as an end.

Thus he has two standpoints from which he can consider himself...: first, as belonging to the world of sense, under the laws of nature (heteronomy), and, second, as belonging to the intelligible world under laws which, independent of nature, are not empirical but founded only on reason.

in its practical purpose the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of reason in our conduct. Hence it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away.

A league of a special sort must . . . be established, one that we can call a league of peace, which will be distinguished from a treaty of peace because the latter seeks merely to stop one war, while the former seeks to end all wars forever.

Our understanding is a faculty of concepts, i.e., a discursive understanding, for which it must of course be contingent what and how different might be the particular that can be given to it in nature and brought under its concepts.

what things may be in themselves, I know not, and need not know because a thing is never presented to me otherwise than as a phenomena.