To expand the quote that gives this book its title: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." It's from Kant, and Isaiah Berlin seized upon it many times as a stick with which to beat those who would try to build heaven on earth, or fit humanity into a straitjacket of their own design. Famously – the incident became a crucial part of the story he told about himself – he had seen, when a child in Riga, a policeman being dragged off by a mob of revolutionaries in 1917. This instilled in him for ever a horror of such violent solutions to humanity's problems.
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