Carl Schmitt quotes

Carl Schmitt was a German legal and political theorist, known for his influential work on the concept of sovereignty and the nature of political power. His writings have shaped debates about constitutional law, the state of exception, and the relationship between law and politics. He remains a controversial figure due to his association with authoritarian ideas and involvement with the Nazi regime. Here are 33 of his quotes:

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

Carl Schmitt

The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.

Carl Schmitt

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.

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

The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.

Carl Schmitt

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

Carl Schmitt

The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.

Carl Schmitt

The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.

Carl Schmitt

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

Carl Schmitt

The inevitable lack of objectivity in political decisions, which is only the reflex to suppress the politically inherent friend-enemy antithesis, manifests itself in the regrettable forms and aspects of the scramble for office and the politics of patronage. The demand for depoliticalization which arises in this context means only the rejection of party politics, etc. The equation politics = party politics is possible whenever antagonisms among domestic political parties succeed in weakening the all-embracing political unit, the state.

Carl Schmitt

To be sure, Protestant theology presents a different, supposedly unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as the "wholly other," just as in political liberalism the state and politics are conceived of as the "wholly other." We have come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced. This also holds for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitical theology.

Carl Schmitt

The political entity presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political entity. As long as a state exists, there will thus always be in the world more than just one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist.

Carl Schmitt

Whoever asserts a value, must bring its influence to bear. Whoever maintains that it has value regardless of the influence brought to bear by any individual human being who endorses it, is simply cheating.

Carl Schmitt

The state as the decisive political entity possesses an enormous power: the possibility of waging war and thereby publicly disposing of the lives of men. The jus belli contains such a disposition. It implies a double possibility: the right to demand from its own members the readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies.

Carl Schmitt

What remains is the remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis that 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 various philosophies of life presented themselves as a conquest of materialism, or in any case, they readily claimed it. That does not change anything: their valuations, revaluations, and explanations of disvalue have been emptied into the over-all secularization stream, where they have only hastened the tendency to unlearn, which is a neutralizing process, after all.

Carl Schmitt

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

Carl Schmitt

Liberalism, with its contradictions and compromises, existed for Donoso Cortés only in that short interim period in which it was possible to answer the question "Christ or Barabbas?” with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation.

Carl Schmitt

Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy. The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.

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

As long as the state is a political entity this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy. Every state provides, therefore, some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy.

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