Categorical Imperative Quotes

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

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.

There is nothing higher than reason.

God’s command ‘Go ye, and preach the gospel to every creature’ was the categorical imperative. The question of personal safety was wholly irrelevant.

There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape.

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.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

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.

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

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.

Morality, after all, has nothing to do with selflessness. On the contrary, self-interest is precisely the basis of the categorical imperative.

It is not God’s will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy

Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.

All our knowledge begins with the senses…

There is only one categorical imperative in golf, and that is to hit the ball. There are no minor absolutes.

If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

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

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.

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.