Isaiah Berlin Quotes

28 quotes in 516 categories

• Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by…
• 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,…
• 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…
• Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.
• To understand is to perceive patterns.
• Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.
• 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…
• 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…
• Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.
• Life may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others.
• When a man speaks of the need for realism one may be sure that this is always the prelude to some bloody deed.
• Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made
• Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.
• All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.
• 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…
• Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally…
• Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge, mercy and justice - all these are ultimate human values, sought for themselves alone; yet when…
• 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.
• The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.
• 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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