Top 13 Quotes & Sayings by Carl Schmitt

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a German philosopher Carl Schmitt.

Last updated on December 18, 2024.

Carl Schmitt was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. A conservative theorist, he is noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism, and his work has been a major influence on subsequent political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology, but its value and significance are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with Nazism. Schmitt's work has attracted the attention of numerous philosophers and political theorists, including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, Jacques Derrida, Waldemar Gurian, Carlo Galli, Jaime Guzmán, Jürgen Habermas, Friedrich Hayek, Reinhart Koselleck, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri, Leo Strauss, Adrian Vermeule, and Slavoj Žižek, among others.

German - Philosopher | July 11, 1888 - April 7, 1985

Source: Wikipedia

All law is situational law. The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision.

Carl Schmitt

The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.

Carl Schmitt

A world state which which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist. The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe.

Carl Schmitt

Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.

Carl Schmitt

I want to paint a canvasthat will be nothing but harmonious tone.

Carl Schmitt

The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.

Carl Schmitt

The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.

Carl Schmitt

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.

Carl Schmitt

Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally.Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.

Carl Schmitt

When will we learn that childhood is in a great sense not simply a preparation for adult life but a thing unique and complete in itself—a masterpiece of God.

Carl Schmitt

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.

Carl Schmitt

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.

Carl Schmitt

The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.

Carl Schmitt

Top 13 Quotes & Sayings by Carl Schmitt

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