Isaiah Berlin Quotes
28 quotes
in 516 categories
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Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by…
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All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is,…
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Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether…
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Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.
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To understand is to perceive patterns.
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Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.
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Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an…
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But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you-the social reformers-see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat…
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Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.
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Life may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others.
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When a man speaks of the need for realism one may be sure that this is always the prelude to some bloody deed.
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Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made
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Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.
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All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.
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The underlying assumption that human nature is basically the same at all times, everywhere, and obeys eternal laws beyond human control, is a conception that…
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Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally…
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Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge, mercy and justice - all these are ultimate human values, sought for themselves alone; yet when…
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The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.
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The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.
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Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of…
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