Leaders of nations, and people whose wealth or fame gives them power over the lives of others quite often do more harm than good.

If the problem of free will is to see how freedom fits into the order of nature, then Kant's basic view about the free will problem is that it is insoluble.

Marx's own illusion was to think that the working class movement, which he devoted his life to creating and strengthening, would both be socially and politically successful in the industrial nations of Western Europe, and that it would develop an entirely new way of human social life that would retain and even enhance the productive benefits of capitalism while overcoming the inhumanity and exploitation of capitalist social relations. Marx himself had no solutions to these problems. His object of study was capitalism itself.

Descartes recommended that we distrust the senses and rely on the ... use of our intellect.

I do not know how much my own work has achieved, and I must not pretend it has done more than it has.

Smith could not be expected to have anticipated the horrors that were to come. But even in his own time, he was a defender of certain state actions that he thought necessary in order to safeguard the good effects of commercial society (Smith did not speak of 'capitalism' and was acquainted only with an early undeveloped form of it). Among these state actions the chief was general public education.

It would be nice, wouldn't it? if we could get comfortable about the problem of freedom. Kant thinks that we can't.