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.'

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

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

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 fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.

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.

Everybody is grappling with their own moral compass, and that needle, like any needle, can't just stick. It's always floating a little bit, and depending on where you're standing, it's hard to read.

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.

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.

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim 'never say never' is one of the most important in ethics.

I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.

You ask yourself not if this or that is expedient, but if it is right.

The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.

I try not to do anything that's immoral.

Ethics is a fluid term ...It's the standards by which a civilized society lives.

The foundations of morality are like all other foundations: If you dig too much about them, the superstructure will come tumbling down.

What we call “morals” is simply blind obedience to words of command.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

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.