"New prejudices will serve as well as old ones to harness the great unthinking masses.For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the most harmless among all the things to which this term can properly be applied. It is the freedom to make public use of one's reason at every point. But I hear on all sides, 'Do not argue!' The Officer says: 'Do not argue but drill!' The tax collector: 'Do not argue but pay!' The cleric: 'Do not argue but believe!' Only one prince in the world says, 'Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey!' Everywhere there is restriction on freedom."

"One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him."

"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."

"An action done from duty has its moral worth, not in the purpose to be attained by it, but in the maxim according with which it is decided upon; it depends therefore, not on the realization of the object of action, but solely on the principle of volition in accordance with which, irrespective of all objects of the faculty of desire, the action has been performed."

"The people naturally adhere most to doctrines which demand the least self-exertion and the least use of their own reason, and which can best accommodate their duties to their inclinations."

"By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man."

"Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason."

"Anarchy is law and freedom without force.Despotism is law and force without freedom.Barbarism force without freedom and law.Republicanism is force with freedom and law."

"Inexperienced in the course of world affairs and incapable of being prepared for all the chances that happen in it, I ask myself only 'Can you also will that your maxim should become a universal law?' Where you cannot it is to be rejected..."

"It must be freely admitted that there is a sort of circle here from which it seems impossible to escape. In the order of efficient causes we assume ourselves free, in order that in the order of ends we may conceive ourselves as subject to these laws because we have attributed to ourselves freedom of will; for freedom and self-legislation of will are both autonomy..."

"From the crooked timber of humanity, a straight board cannot be hewn."

"Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved."

"So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world."

"I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith."

"The touchstone of everything that can be concluded as a law for a people lies in the question whether the people could have imposed such a law on itself."

"Physicsis the philosophy of nature, so far as it is based on empirical laws."

"Nature generally in the distribution of her capacities has adapted the means to the endso nature's true destination must be to produce a will, not merely good as a means to something else, but good in itself, for which reason wasimparted to us as a practicalabsolutely necessaryfaculty."

"Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt."

"Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge."

"Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose."

"To be unfaithful to my maxim of prudence may often be very advantageous to me, although to abide by it is certainly safer."

"He who would know the world must first manufacture it."

"But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience."

"If we were to suppose that mankind never can or will be in a better condition, it seems impossible to justify by any kind of theodicy the mere fact that such a race of corrupt beings could have been created on earth at all."

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."

"Philosophical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from concepts mathematical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from the construction of concepts."

"Simply to acquiesce in skepticism can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason."

"We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without."

"Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end."

"He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals."

"The whole interest of my reason, whether speculative or practical, is concentrated in the three following questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?"

"Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them."

"Even if, by some especially unfortunate fate or by the niggardly provision of stepmotherly nature, [the good will] should be wholly lacking in the power to accomplish its purpose; if with the greatest effort it should yet achieve nothing, and only the good will should remain (not, to be sure, as a mere wish but as the summoning of all the means in our power), yet would it, like a jewel, still shine by its own light as something which has its full value in itself."

"High towers, and metaphysically-great men resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos, the bottom-land, of experience; and the word transcendental, does not signify something passing beyond all experience, but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make cognition of experience possible."

"Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'"

"Imitation finds no place at all in morality, and examples serve only for encouragement, that is, they put beyond doubt the feasibility of what the law commands, they make visible that which the practical rule expresses more generally, but they can never authorize us to set aside the true original which lies in reason, and to guide ourselves by examples."

"Treat people as an end, and never as a means to an end."

"Woman wants control, man self-control ."

"I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief."

"Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself."

"The sight of a being who is not adorned with a single feature of a pure and good will, enjoying unbroken prosperity, can never give pleasure to an impartial rational spectator. Thus a good will appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of being worthy of happiness."

"May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law."

"In its practical purpose the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of reason in our conduct. Hence it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away."

"Human reason in its pure use, so long as it was not critically examined, has first tried all possible wrong ways before it succeeded in finding the one true way."

"Innocence is a splendid thing, only it has the misfortune not to keep very well and to be easily misled."

"In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so."

"All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us."

"Moral instruction, although containing much that is convincing for the reason, accomplisheslittlebecause the teachers themselves have not got their own notions clear, and when they endeavor to make up for this by raking up motives of moral goodness from every quarter, trying to make their physic right strong, they spoil it."

"What is more, we cannot do morality a worse service than by seeing to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first itself be judged by moral principles in order to decide if it is fit to serve as an original example...even the Holy One of the gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize him to be such."

"Dignity is a value that creates irreplaceability."