Top 100 Quotes About Kant
#1. Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
#2. The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.
Bryan Magee
#3. Go ahead; take Kant's PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE METAPHYSIC and get it to show what he is telling. We would all be a lot happier.
Natalie Goldberg
#4. In his essay, 'Perpetual Peace,' the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.
Henry Kissinger
#5. Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.
W. Somerset Maugham
#6. When Friedrich Nietzsche mocked Immanuel Kant for having "discovered a moral faculty in man", he inadvertently resolved Kant's dilemma of being unable to identify what exactly constituted his "moral law" for fear of offending against a charge of empiricism from the likes of David Hume.
Joseph B.H. McMillan
#7. I'm no syllogism incarnate, but my wife makes me look like Immanuel Kant.
Claudia Cardinale
#8. Plato and Aristotle are my teachers. Even Kant is my teacher, but my greatest teacher is my failures.
Debasish Mridha
#9. Immanuel Kant would've made a lousy lawyer, but a great judge!
Stephen Gillers
#11. [To] interpret Parmenides as a Kant before Kant ... this is exactly what we must do.
Karl Popper
#12. I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#13. I'm on the cross. be kind and they put you on the cross. that son of a bitch on his couch talking about Mahler and Kant and cunt and revolution, not really knowing about any of them.
Charles Bukowski
#14. Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.
Ayn Rand
#15. Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.
Roger Scruton
#16. But the self is precisely the integrator; it is the synthetic unity, as Kant said. It is the artist of life. It is only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by.
Paul Goodman
#17. Kant's style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness.
Alfred Nobel
#18. In Kant and Nietzsche we have the moralists of German militarism.
Thomas Mann
#19. Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity.
George Will
#20. Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.
Steven Pinker
#21. The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.
Frederick C. Beiser
#22. For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.
Paul Engle
#23. 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
#24. If God is dead, Nietzsche is perhaps the person who stumbles across the corpse; nevertheless, it is Kant whose fingerprints are all over the murder weapon.
Will Buckingham
#25. Well, I don't know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I'm no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.
Roger Penrose
#26. Historically the most striking result of Kant's labors was the rapid separation of the thinkers of his own nation and, though less completely, of the world, into two parties;-the philosophers and the scientists.
Lawrence Joseph Henderson
#27. Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
#28. [Kant] was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed imjplicitly in the maximx that he had imbibed at his mother's knee.
Bertrand Russell
#30. The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is only preparatory. This second aspect is the one which from Kant, until the present time, has formed the deeper problem of thought.
Josiah Royce
#31. 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?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#32. 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.
Daniel Keyes
#33. I started to read as obsessively about Star Wars as I once did about Kant - and still do about behavioral economics and behavioral psychology.
Cass Sunstein
#34. We can, following the exemple of Kant, consider the moral development and improvement of men, as the supreme goal of human evolution.
African Spir
#35. The great thinkers have long pointed to a connection between creativity and happiness. "Happiness," Kant once said, "is an ideal not of reason but of imagination." In other words, we create our happiness, and the first step in creating anything is to imagine it.
Eric Weiner
#36. To suppose a reader thoroughly indifferent to Kant, is to suppose him thoroughly unintellectual; and, therefore, though in reality he should happen not to regard him with interest, it is one of the fictions of courtesy to presume that he does.
Thomas De Quincey
#37. So I do, of course, reject much that is central not only to the psychology of Descartes and Kant, but to their epistemology as well. No doubt, the best available theories of today will look primitive in comparison with what we are in a position to understand hundreds of years from now.
Hilary Kornblith
#38. You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.
Richard Rorty
#39. Immanuel Kant believed that we humans, because we are so emotionally complex, go through two puberties in life. The first puberty is when our bodies become mature enough for sex; the second puberty is when our minds becomes mature enough for sex.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#40. My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#41. Kant is the most evil man in mankind's history.
Ayn Rand
#42. Kant ... discovered "the scandal of reason," that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.
Hannah Arendt
#43. Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#44. I was raised in a household where I read Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky and Kant, and I was never taught that my mind was feminine. I'm aware that my body is.
Jewel
#45. People who read mainly the Grounding and the Critique often criticize Kant for having his head in the clouds and for not being convincingly capable of dealing with concrete cases. A reading of the Metaphysics of Morals will show anyone how unfounded such criticisms are.
Immanuel Kant
#46. This part of Kant's view is, I believe, a profound truth. We can be morally responsible in several other ways, or senses, but no one could ever be responsible, I believe, in any way that could make them deserve to suffer. Nor, I believe, does anyone deserve to be less happy.
Derek Parfit
#47. Kant ... stated that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge ... to make room for faith," but all he had "denied" was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.
Hannah Arendt
#48. I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.
Bernard Beckett
#49. We can be sure, he [Kant] says, that anything we shall ever experience must show the characteristics affirmed of it in our a priori knowledge, because these characteristics are due to our own nature, and therefore nothing can ever come into our experience without acquiring these characteristics.
Bertrand Russell
#50. Oh, a bookshop. Why not pop in and buy a little Kant? And perhaps just a quarter-pound of Kafka. Don't bother to wrap it, thanks. I'll eat it here.
Frederick Busch
#51. All praise to the masters indeed, but we too could produce a Kant or a Hugo.
Jose Clemente Orozco
#52. In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.
Italo Calvino
#53. The conversations were miles beyond Jo's comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing 'evolved from her inner consciousness' was a bad headache after it was all over.
Louisa May Alcott
#54. It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.
James Gleick
#55. No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.
Wilhelm Dilthey
#56. Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome.
Camille Paglia
#57. Duty is for Kant the One and All. Out of the duty of gratitude, he claims, one has to defend and esteem the ancients; and only out of duty has he become a great man.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#58. Always in England if you had the type of brain that was capable of understanding T.S. Eliot's poetry or Kant's logic, you could be sure of finding large numbers of people who would hate you violently.
D.J. Taylor
#59. Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative" says that individual actions are to be judged according to whether we would be pleased if everyone in society took the same action.
Tom Butler-Bowdon
#60. Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.
H.L. Mencken
#61. For Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#62. Albert [Einstein] was reading Kant and attending occasional lectures at the University of Pavia: for pleasure, without being registered there or having to think about exams. It is thus that serious scientists are made.
Carlo Rovelli
#63. Immanuel Kant famously claimed that 'he who wills the ends wills the means,' but he never spent much time in Washington.
Elliott Abrams
#64. The long history of this idea before Kant made it the basis of his Critique of Judgment shows that the concept of taste was originally more a moral than an aesthetic idea.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
#65. There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don't have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.
John Cage
#66. According to Kant's late work on the Principles of Politics (1793), the irreducible problem of the human species is the following: the human being is an animal and thus, to live peacefully with other animals of its kind, absolutely needs a master.
Gregg Lambert
#67. How I understand the philosopher - as a terrible explosive, endangering everthing ... my concept of the philosopher is worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of academic "ruminants" and other professors of philosophy ...
Friedrich Nietzsche
#68. UNDERSTANDING, n. A cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know a house from a horse by the roof on the house. Its nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke, who rode a house, and Kant, who lived in a horse.
Ambrose Bierce
#69. Kant's philosophy states that it is inherent in us. He agreed with Hume that we cannot know with certainty what the world is like "in itself." We can only know the what the world is like "for me" of for everybody.
Jostein Gaarder
#70. G.W.F. Hegel. "He's perfect," Weishaupt wrote ... "Unlike Kant, who makes sense only in German, this man doesn't make sense in any language.
Robert Anton Wilson
#71. You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#72. Something which, for want of a more definite term at present, I must be permitted to be called queer; but which Mr. Coleridge would have called mystical, Mr. Kant pantheistical, Mr. Carlyle twistical, and Mr. Emerson hyperquizzitistical.
Edgar Allan Poe
#73. 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
#74. Putting this all together, it makes sense that WEIRD philosophers since Kant and Mill have mostly generated moral systems that are individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That's the morality you need to govern a society of autonomous individuals.
Jonathan Haidt
#75. Morality, on the other hand, as Immanuel Kant insisted, is ultimately practical: though it matters morally what we think and feel, morality is, at its heart, about what we do.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
#76. Kant ate but once a day, and drank no beer. Of this liquor, (I mean the strong black beer,) he was, indeed, the most determined enemy. If ever a man died prematurely, Kant would say - 'He has been drinking beer, I presume.
Thomas De Quincey
#77. The more narrow-minded a system is the more it will please worldly-wise people. Thus the system of the materialists, the doctrine of Helvetius and also Locke has recieved the most acclaim amongst his class. Thus Kant even now will find more followers than Fichte.
Novalis
#78. Berkeley , Hume, Kant , Fichte , Hegel , James , Bergson all are united in one earnest attempt, the attempt to reinstate man with his high spiritual claims in a place of importance in the cosmic scheme.
David Hume
#79. Whenever my behavior is biologically determined or socially conditioned, it is not truly free. To act freely, according to Kant, is to act autonomously. And to act autonomously is to act according to a law I give myself - not according to the dictates of nature or social convention.
Michael J. Sandel
#80. The former morality, namely Kant's, demanded of the individual actions which one desired of all men: that was a very naive thing;
Friedrich Nietzsche
#81. Intelligence, Kant reminds, is not so much a result of genius, rather it is a consequence of a determination to use it.
Michael R. LeGault
#82. Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
Alain De Botton
#83. Intellectualism - the conception of man as above all a thinking animal, consciously adapting means to rationally chosen ends - fell sick with Rousseau, took to its bed with Kant, and died with Schopenhauer.
Will Durant
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche's work is that Kant had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of critique in terms of values.
Gilles Deleuze
#87. Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.
Stefan Zweig
#88. The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.
Karl Kraus
#89. The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.
William James
#90. Seek not the favor of the mulititude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them. Immanuel Kant
Bohdi Sanders
#91. These books are all refreshingly clear-headed and unfashionable, free of cant and free of Kant;
Edward Feser
#92. Kant, as we all know, compared moral law to the starry heavens, and found them both sublime. On the naturalistic hypothesis we should rather compare it to the protective blotches on a beetle's back, and find them both ingenious.
Arthur Balfour
#93. To become truly human,one has to try an release oneself from the shackles of race,religion and nationality.The quantum of humanism one acquires is inevitably filtered when one limits oneself.-Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad(Kant Lecture,20090)
Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad
#94. Kant introduced the concept of the negative into philosophy. Would it not also be worthwhile to try to introduce the concept of the positive into philosophy?
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#95. What Kant refers to as depression is simply this stark realization: that thought is only incidentally human. It would take a later generation of philosophers to derive the conclusion of this: that thought thinks us, not the reverse. Legend
Eugene Thacker
#96. I just wanted to go home. Take a quick bath, have a beer, and sink into my warm bed with my cigarettes and Kant.
Haruki Murakami
#97. If we could see ourselves ... as we really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, our community which neither began at birth nor will end with the death of the body.
Immanuel Kant
#98. It is an empirical judgement [to say] that I perceive and judge an object with pleasure. But it is an a priori judgement [to say] that I find it beautiful, i.e. I attribute this satisfaction necessarily to every one.
Immanuel Kant
#99. There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced.
Immanuel Kant
#100. It is often necessary to make a decision on the basis of knowledge sufficient for action but insufficient to satisfy the intellect.
Immanuel Kant
