Immanuel Kant Famous Quotes

People who are humble about their own nature are moral realists. Moral realists are aware that we are all built from “crooked timber”— from Immanuel Kant’s famous line, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

The eighteenth century is famously the age of wigs and salons, of wits and philosophes, of experimental science and the first turning of the wheels of the Industrial Revolution—and the transatlantic slave trade. In England, the era dubbed itself the Augustan Age. On the other side of Europe, Immanuel Kant coined another term: the Age of Enlightenment. They might just as well have called it the Age of Locke. No thinker since Socrates dominated the minds of his immediate successors as John Locke did. His ideas were the flammable fuel of the Enlightenment, and sent it soaring to new intellectual heights.

All morality presupposes a universalizing principle. As Immanuel Kant put it, “Act as if the maxim through which you act were to become through your will a universal law.” The absence of this universalizing principle, the refusal to respect the principle, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” should have rendered Nazi policies recognizable as immoral from the start, just as we should for the same reason recognize US policies as immoral today. This Kantian principle is expressed in Martin Luther King’s famous maxim, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.