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Kant's style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness. -- Alfred Nobel
All praise to the masters indeed, but we too could produce a Kant or a Hugo. -- Jose Clemente Orozco
Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers. -- Alain de Botton
You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant. -- Karl Kraus
The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy. -- Bryan Magee
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
Immanuel Kant famously claimed that 'he who wills the ends wills the means,' but he never spent much time in Washington. -- Elliott Abrams
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Immanuel isn't a pun; he Kant be! -- Oscar Wilde
Kant is the most evil man in mankind's history. -- Ayn Rand
Immanuel Kant would've made a lousy lawyer, but a great judge! -- Stephen Gillers
Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant. -- W. Somerset Maugham
I'm no syllogism incarnate, but my wife makes me look like Immanuel Kant. -- Claudia Cardinale
Kant certainly was sympathetic with the metaphysical tradition of rational theology that he criticized. -- Allen W. Wood
Kant thinks we can show that there is no contradiction in supposing we are free. -- Allen W. Wood
[To] interpret Parmenides as a Kant before Kant ... this is exactly what we must do. -- Karl Popper
Kant was a rational theologian. He did not pretend to be a biblical or revealed theologian. -- Allen W. Wood
All praise to the masters indeed, but we too could produce a Kant or a Hugo. -- Jose Clemente Orozco
Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. -- Ayn Rand
I think the term "Kantian constructivism" as an oxymoron. Kant was a constructivist about mathematics, but not about ethics. -- Allen W. Wood
It would be nice, wouldn't it? if we could get comfortable about the problem of freedom. Kant thinks that we can't. -- Allen W. Wood
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
We can, following the exemple of Kant, consider the moral development and improvement of men, as the supreme goal of human evolution. -- African Spir
Kant can provide, and has provided, a good model for philosophers to think about the relation of metaphysics to science and scientific methodology. -- Allen W. Wood
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
Kant thinks of judgment as a special faculty or talent of the mind, not reducible to discursive reasoning but cultivated through experience and practice. -- Allen W. Wood
Kant does not regard freedom as an item of faith because it is too basic to our agency to be related to any end. -- Allen W. Wood
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
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
Kant's system of duties constitutes a Doctrine of Virtue because the duties also indicate what kinds of attitudes, dispositions and feelings are morally virtuous or vicious. -- Allen W. Wood
Kant attempted to work out a view of religion and religious belief according to which existing religions could be brought into harmony with modernity, science and reason. -- Allen W. Wood
Kant considers belief in God and immortality to be items of "faith" because he relates faith to the pursuit of ends - in this case, the highest good. -- Allen W. Wood
[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
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
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
Kant says that we may regard ourselves as legislator of the moral law, and consider ourselves as its author, but not that we are legislators or authors of the law. -- Allen W. Wood
Kant does represents a distinctively modern view of the human condition in contrast to that of ancient high culture, found in ancient Greek ethics and also in ancient Chinese ethics. -- Allen W. Wood
As Kant says, the contribution of any common laborer would be greater than that of the greatest philosopher unless the philosopher makes some contribution to establishing the rights of humanity. -- Allen W. Wood
I don't think Kant's approach to religion is any longer viable in its original form. But that does not mean it is simply wrong or that we cannot learn from it. -- Allen W. Wood
If the problem of free will is to see how freedom fits into the order of nature, then Kant's basic view about the free will problem is that it is insoluble. -- Allen W. Wood
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
Kant takes a free will to be a being or substance with the power to cause a state of the world (or a whole series of such states) spontaneously or from itself. -- Allen W. Wood
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
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
If being "iron headed" is to be lacking such feelings, then Kant's position is that an ironheaded person could not be a moral agent because such a person would not be rational. -- Allen W. Wood
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
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
Kant did think he had a moral route back to rational faith in God, for those who need it, and he thought that at some level, we all do need something like it. -- Allen W. Wood
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
Kant thinks that a free will is a will under moral laws and that freedom and the moral law are distinct thoughts that reciprocally imply each other. Fichte thinks they are the same thought. -- Allen W. Wood
My own view is that Kant's conception of the duality of the good (morality and happiness, the good of our person and the good of our state or condition) is a distinctively modern view. -- Allen W. Wood
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
The picture of Kant as the 'theological Robespierre' or the "world-crusher" was first suggested by someone with whom Kant stood in a relation of philosophical disagreement but also great mutual respect: namely, Moses Mendelssohn. -- Allen W. Wood
We are generally forced to choose one way or the other of distancing ourselves from Kant. I suppose I tend to choose the irreligious way. But I regret that Kant's path has not been followed. -- Allen W. Wood
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
It was an important part of Mendelssohn's philosophical and religious view that the traditional rationalist proofs for God's existence should be sound an convincing. Kant thought they were not. So Kant's critique was world-shaking for Mendelssohn. -- Allen W. Wood
I don't think Kant's theory looks bad to people except insofar as they have misunderstood it (for instance, as heartless and ironheaded, or as committed to an absurd metaphysical conception of freedom that violates Kant's own philosophy). -- Allen W. Wood
...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
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
Kant is not saying - about freedom or any other subject - anything of the form: "Not-p but we must assume that p." That's close to self-contradictory, like Moore's paradox: "p, but I don't believe that p". -- Allen W. Wood
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
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
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
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
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
Kant does not think that the silly commandment "universalize your maxims" is the be-all and end-all of ethics or that it provides us with some sort of general decision procedure that is supposed to tell us what to do under all circumstances. -- Allen W. Wood
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
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
Surely the world will be a better place, at least marginally, if people have a better understanding of Kant and Hegel, if Marx's thought its studied and appreciated, if people gain a better understanding of Fichte, whose philosophy is far more important than people realize. -- Allen W. Wood
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
I think Fichte did take it further than Kant by arguing that we can regard the moral law as objectively valid only by seeing it as addressed to us by another being, even though Fichte thought God could not literally be a person who could address us. -- Allen W. Wood
Kant ... was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing. -- Hannah Arendt
Kant has been famous for his rejection of eudaimonism, but I think Kantian ethics has a great deal in common with Aristotle, and some things in common with Stoicism as well. The traditions tend, I believe, to talk past each other when it comes to happiness or eudaimonia. -- Allen W. Wood
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Kant argued that, where nature could be considered beautiful in her acts of destruction, human violence appeared instead as monstrous. However, a misreading of Kant in Romantic philosophy led to the idealization of the murderer as a sublime genius that has colored constructions of that criminal figure ever since. -- Richard Marshall
Just as we might take Darwin as an example of the normal extraverted thinking type, the normal introverted thinking type could be represented by Kant. The one speaks with facts, the other relies on the subjective factor. Darwin ranges over the wide field of objective reality, Kant restricts himself to a critique of knowledge. -- Carl Jung

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