“To comprehend what is is the task of philosophy, for what is, is reason.”

“As far as the individual is concerned, each is at any rate a son of his time; so philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thought.”

“When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of the dusk.”

“The philosophical science of right has as its object the Idea of right, the concept of right and its actualization.”

“The Idea of right is freedom.”

“Whoever has not thought himself is not free – whoever is not free has not thought himself, that is, not in such a way that this thinking of oneself, this being universal, is precisely his being –”

“The soil of right is the spiritual in general, and its more precise place and point of departure is the will, which is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance and determination, and the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom, the world of spirit brought forth out of itself, as a second nature.”

“Every representation is a generalization, and this belongs to thought.”

“The rational is the highway on which everyone travels, where no one stands out.”

“The person must give itself an external sphere of its freedom in order to be as Idea.”

“Only he can be compelled to do something who is willing to let himself be compelled.”

“Passionate love and marriage are two different things”

“If women are at the head of government, the state is in danger, for they act not according to the demands of universality but according to contingent inclination and opinion.”

“The tendency of social conditions toward the indeterminate multiplication and specification of needs, means, and enjoyments – which, like the distinction between natural and cultivated need, has no limits – namely luxury, is equally an infinite increase of dependence and want, which has to contend with a matter offering infinite resistance, namely with external means of the particular kind that is the property of the free will, and which is thus absolutely hard.”

“The abstraction of producing, moreover, makes labour ever more mechanical, until finally the human being is able to step aside and let the machine take his place.”

“In this dependence and reciprocity of labour and the satisfaction of needs, subjective selfishness turns into a contribution to the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else – into the mediation of the particular through the universal as a dialectical movement, so that, in acquiring, producing, and enjoying on his own account, each thereby produces and acquires for the enjoyment of all the others.”

“That the individual at first (that is, especially in youth) resists the idea of deciding upon a particular estate, and regards this as a restriction on his universal vocation and as a merely external necessity, lies in the abstract thinking that stops short at the universal and hence the unreal, and fails to recognize that, in order to exist at all, the concept must in general enter into the distinction between the concept and its reality, and hence into determinacy and particularity, and that only in this way can it gain actuality and ethical objectivity.”

“A human being counts as such because he is a human being, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, etc. This consciousness, for which thought is valid, is of infinite importance – deficient only when it fixes itself, say, as cosmopolitanism, in opposition to the concrete life of the state.”

“To posit something as universal – that is, to bring it to consciousness as universal – is, as is well known, to think.”

“When a large mass of people sinks below the level of a certain standard of living – one that automatically regulates itself as the standard necessary for a member of society – and thereby loses that feeling of right, integrity, and honour which comes from supporting oneself by one’s own activity and work, this leads to the creation of a rabble, which in turn makes it far easier for disproportionate wealth to be concentrated in a few hands.”

“It is thereby revealed that, despite an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough – that is, its own resources are insufficient – to check excessive poverty and the creation of a rabble.”

“The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea.”

“The case is rather this: that the people, insofar as this word denotes a particular part of the members of a state, expresses that part which does not know what it wills.”

“Public opinion deserves to be as much respected as despised.”

“Nations that are at odds with themselves internally gain inner peace through wars abroad.”