Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we make ourselves happy, but how we make ourselves worthy of happiness.
So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.
Nobody can compel me to be happy in his own way. Paternalism is the great despotism imaginable.
Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him to use him as mere means to some external purpose.
Honesty is better than any policy.
Through war, through the taxing and never-ending accumulation of armament, through the want which any state, even in peacetime, must suffer internally, Nature forces them to make at first inadequate and tentative attempts; finally, after devastations, revolutions, and even complete exhaustion, she brings them to that which reason could have told them at the beginning and with far less sad experience, to wit, to step from the lawless condition of savages into a league of nations.
Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as the means only.
The state of peace among men living side by side is not the natural state; the natural state is one of war.
There is . . . only one categorical imperative. It is: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped.
That kings should philosophize or philosophers become kings is not to be expected. Nor is it to be wished, since the possession of power inevitably corrupts the untrammeled judgment of reason.
A free will and a will [subject to] moral laws are identical.
Image source: Wikiwak
That's good. I also recommend one good biography describing Kant's life and career www.fampeople.com/cat-immanuel-kant
Posted by: Kira Sergeeva | 10/31/2012 at 04:23 PM