There is no author or legislator of the moral law. It is simply valid in itself in the nature or essence of things. We become autonomous only when we obey it, because then our will aligns itself with the objectively valid law, and our choice follows the same law as that we give ourselves. We can think of rational faculty (or the idea - the pure rational concept, not exhibitable in experience) as the legislator or author of the law because reason recognizes an objective standard, and to that extent is already aligned with objective moral truth.

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.

Not only our moral life, but even our use of theoretical reason - on which we rely in rationally inquiring into nature - presupposes that we are free.

It is a culturally interesting (but also deeply depressing) fact that many religious claims seem to retain their emotional power for believers only if taken in ways that are intellectually unsupportable and even morally contemptible.

Adam Smith was aware of the way that economic interests could have a distorting and destructive effect both on the market and on politics.

Virtues consist not only of acting in certain ways, but in ways of caring and feeling.

Hegel's theory of recognition is basically derived from Fichte, who is its real author.