23 Quotes by 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.

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.

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.

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.

When will we learn that childhood is in a great sense not simply a preparation for adult life but a thing unique and complete in itself – a masterpiece of God.

In general, it would be a peculiar type of ‘justice’ to declare a majority all the better and more just the more overwhelming it is, and to maintain abstractly that ninety-eight people abusing two persons is by far not so unjust as fifty-one people mistreating forty-nine. At this point, pure mathematics becomes simple inhumanity.

All law is situational law. The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision.

A world state which which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist. The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe.

The emptiness of mere majority calculus deprives legality of all persuasive power.