The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.

The person must give himself an external sphere of freedom in order to have being as Idea.

I have the courage to be mistaken.

In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize.

Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.