Utilitarians are usually empiricists who think they can solve every problem by accumulating enough empirical facts. They do not realize that thinking as well as experience is necessary to know anything or get anything right.

People are often most proud of precisely those things of which they should most be ashamed.

Fichte is concerned with freedom as non-domination.

In my view, there was a long period in which analytical philosophy had little to say about ethics. I think their intellectual tools did not do well with it, and analytical philosophy was above all about revolutionizing the philosophical tool box. It was more or less assumed that the Truth about ethics was some form of utilitarianism (perhaps because some consequentialist calculus looked to them like a respectable tool). Kantian ethics was then interpreted as a particularly odious version of the False - "deontology" - and treated with contempt.

It is absurd for anyone to think that Soviet "Marxism" is a correct application of the thought of Karl Marx. No doubt Soviet propaganda represented it this way. But who believes Soviet propaganda? It is remarkable (but maybe not so remarkable after all, when you consider their motives) that apologists for capitalism, who would not accept Soviet propaganda on any other point, are eager to agree with it on this point.

We cannot predict the effects of our actions, especially our collective actions over generations or centuries, to use instrumental reasoning toward these big final ends to tell us what we ought to do.

Notice that tearing oneself out of the insensible state is the opposite of remaining in it; the man who is beneficent from duty nevertheless acts with feelings, if not with empirical inclinations.