Carl Schmitt Short Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

View all Carl Schmitt Quotes
The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.

Carl Schmitt
That the state is an entity and in fact the decisive entity rests upon its political character.

Carl Schmitt
A definition of the political can be obtained only by discovering and defining the specifically political categories.

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

Carl Schmitt
Value has its own logic. In the constitutional state that is most clearly recognizable in the enactment of its constitution.

Carl Schmitt
All genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.

Carl Schmitt
The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other.

Carl Schmitt
Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.

Carl Schmitt
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
War as the most extreme political means discloses the possibility which underlies every political idea, namely, the distinction of friend and enemy.

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
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.

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