“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
— Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim
What this quote means
Kant’s sober realism about human nature: our flaws are not a bug to be engineered away but the material from which any social order must be built. Later adopted by Isaiah Berlin as an emblem of anti-utopian thought.
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