Date: 1780-1?

"The inner judicial proceeding of conscience may be aptly compared with an external court of law."

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: 1781, second ed. 1787

"Reason must approach nature with the view, indeed, of receiving information from it, not, however, in the character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master chooses to tell him, but in that of a judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to pro...

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: 1797-8, 1799

"Conscience is practical reason holding the human being's duty before him for his acquittal or condemnation in every case that comes under a law."

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: 1797-8, 1799

"Consciousness of an inner court in the human being ('before which his thoughts accuse or excuse one another') is conscience."

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: 1833, 1840

"The phenomena must be freed once and for all from the grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense."

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749-1832)

Date: September, 1843

"In Germany, everything is forcibly suppressed; a real anarchy of the mind, the reign of stupidity itself, prevails there, and Zurich obeys orders from Berlin."

— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)

Date: 2001

"Yet this self-censorship of my mind, the constant suppression of the memories surfacing in me, Austerlitz continued, demanded ever greater efforts and finally, and unavoidably, led to the almost total paralysis of my linguistic faculties, the destruction of all my notes and sketches, my endless ...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)