“History, only history, only the sum of the concrete events in time and space – the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical… — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share Image
“Men would no longer be victims of nature or of their own largely irrational societies: reason would triumph; universal harmonious cooperation, true history, would at last begin. For if this was not so, do the ideas of progress, of history,… — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share Image
Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is… — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share Image
Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience. — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share Image
“The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced by choices equally absolute, the realisation of some of… — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share Image
The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other… — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share Image
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share Image
Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove… — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share Image
Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to… — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share Image
All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning… — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share Image
The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist. — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share Image
“True pluralism, as Berlin understands it, is much more tough-minded and intellectually bold: it rejects the view that all conflicts of values can be finally resolved by synthesis and that all desirable goals may be reconciled. It recognises that human nature generates values which, though equally sacred, equally ultimate, exclude one another, without there being any possibility of establishing an… — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share
Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge, mercy and justice - all these are ultimate human values, sought for themselves alone; yet… — Isaiah Berlin Copy Share Image
