Immanuel Kant Quotes

If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.

Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help.

My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.

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

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.

The ends do not justify the means. The means are the ends.

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

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

If the Soviet Government orders me to act against my conscience, I do not obey …. Conscience is above the law. No law which is against the conscience can bind.

I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the 'sciences of human action' is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation.

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

I don't really consider this a political issue, I consider it to be a moral issue.

Morality is either a social contract or you have to pay cash.

All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.

The only thing that is good without qualification is a good will.

Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tried to derive the 'ought' from the 'is.' My point of view is that this is impossible; this is a farce.

There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.

At the end of the day, if there are truly ethical considerations, those have to override scientific considerations.

Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.