Kant Quotes - page 2
It was this savagery and madness which darkened the understanding of the most prominent representatives of the culture of all nations, such as Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus, Mohamed, Martin Luther, Giordano Bruno, Frederick the Great, Voltaire, Josef II, Napoleon I, Goethe, Herder, Immanuel Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Charles Fournier, Ludwig Feuerbach, Richard Wagner, Bismarck, Rudolf Virchow, Theodor Billroth, Eugen Duhring - and countless others in all fields to come out against the Jews. Savagery and madness, finally, explains the anti-Semitism of the most distinguished representatives of our culture, such as Simion Barnutiu, B. P. Hajdau, Vasile Alecsandri, Vasile Conta, Mihail Eminescu.
A.C. Cuza
Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials. But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper. 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. Men's egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness as a sex. [...] Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species.
Camille Paglia
However, his contemporary, Leibnitz, the father of the German enlightenment, who created an optimistic world-picture, always remained only a philosopher for philosophers. Even Immanuel Kant, although always famous, was never popular. In his own fatherland he was all but forgotten for most of the nineteenth century until revived by Hermann Cohen and his school. Spinoza, however, was never exhumed because he was never buried. Kant, because of his exclusive intellectuality, has influenced only his students, while Spinoza, because of his emotional appeal, has ruled even those who have never heard his name.
Baruch Spinoza
Now, if instituting comparisons in both directions, we place the lowest and most ape-like men (the Austral Negroes, Bushmen, and Andamans, etc.), on the one hand, together with the most highly developed animals, for instance, with apes, dogs, and elephants, and on the other hand, with the most highly developed men-Aristotle, Newton, Spinoza, Kant, Lamarck, or Goethe-we can then no longer consider the assertion, that the mental life of the higher mammals has gradually developed up to that of man, as in any way exaggerated. If one must draw a sharp boundary between them, it has to be drawn between the most highly developed and civilized man on the one hand, and the rudest savages on the other, and the latter have to be classed with the animals.
Baruch Spinoza
Rawls resorted to Hegel in his internal reflections on a constitutional state. On the plane of inter-state relations, Kant remained his philosopher of reference, as the theorist of conditions for a perpetual peace. So too for Habermas. But since Kant failed to envisage the necessary legal framework for a cosmopolitan order, as it started to take shape through the permanent institutions of the United Nations, Habermas, when he came to review the progress made since 1945, also looked towards the philosopher of objective idealism. Measured against the sombre background of the disasters of the first half of the twentieth century, he decided, ‘the World Spirit, as Hegel would have put it, has lurched forward'. As we have seen, Bobbio was responsible for the most pointed appeal to Hegel of all. In one sense, he was more entitled to do so.
Perry Anderson
Moreover I want to tell Dr. Süßheim -- who wants to portray every anti-Semite as a psychopath -- about his racial fellow Dr. Otto Weininger, who as an honest Jew wrote down his thoughts in the book "Sex and Character":
"Jewry seems to be somewhat anthropologically related to the Negroes and the Mongolians. To the Negro points the readily curling hair, to an admixture of Mongolian blood points the very Chinese or Malayan formed skull, that one finds so often among Jews, which matches the usually yellowish complexion ... The fact that excellent men have almost always been anti-Semites (Tacitus, Pascal, Voltaire, Goethe, Kant, Jean Paul, Schopenhauer, Grillparzer, Richard Wagner) can be explained in the following way: they, who have so much more in their own nature than other men, can also better understand Jewry."
Julius Streicher
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.
Jorge Luis Borges