Immanuel Kant Quotes
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Life is the faculty of spontaneous activity, the awareness that we have powers.
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Deaths, births, and marriages, considering how much they are separately dependent on the freedom of the human will, should seem to be subject to no law according to which any calculation could be made beforehand of their amount; and yet the yearly registers of these events in great countries prove that they go on with as much conformity to the laws of nature as the oscillations of the weather.
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[A ruler is merely] the trustee of the rights of other men and he must always stand in dread of having in some way violated these rights.
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Parents usually educate their children merely in such a manner than however bad the world may be, they may adapt themselves to its present conditions. But they ought to give them an education so much better than this, that a better condition of things may thereby be brought about by the future.
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There are three juridical attributes that inseparably belong to the citizen by right. These are:
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Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.
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Both love of mankind, and respect for their rights are duties; the former however is only a conditional, the latter an unconditional, purely imperative duty, which he must be perfectly certain not to have transgressed who would give himself up to the secret emotions arising from benevolence.
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Man's duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.
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If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.
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Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.
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Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment. "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" (1785)
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Maximum individuality within maximum community.
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Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.
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This spirit of freedom is expanding even where it must struggle against the external obstacles of governments that misunderstand their own function. Such governments are illuminated by the example that the existence of freedom need not give cause for the least concern regarding public order and harmony in the commonwealth. If only they refrain from inventing artifices to keep themselves in it, men will gradually raise themselves from barbarism.
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But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.
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Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.
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Philosophy stands in need of a science which shall determine the possibility, principles, and extent of human knowledge à priori.
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Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law.
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Freedom in the practical sense is the independence of the power of choice from necessitation by impulses of sensibility.
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Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, 'War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.'
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Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.
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The more we come in contact with animals and observe their behaviour, the more we love them, for we see how great is their care of the young.
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Law And Freedom without Violence (Anarchy) Law And Violence without Freedom (Despotism) Violence without Freedom And Law (Barbarism) Violence with Freedom And Law (Republic)
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Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end. - 'Metaphysical Principles of Virtue.