Top 48 Berlin Isaiah Quotes

#1. Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #26183
#2. The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced by choices equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably mean the sacrifice of others.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #70006
#3. 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 behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side ... in the great ideological wars of our time.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #103075
#4. 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 them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #111404
#5. Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #207651
#6. No perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #247795
#7. I can see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #250562
#8. 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 only a handful of bold thinkers have dared to question.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #269137
#9. When a man speaks of the need for realism one may be sure that this is always the prelude to some bloody deed.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #271239
#10. One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the alter of the great historical ideas - justice or progress or happiness of future generations ... or emancipation of a nation or race or class ... this is the belief that somewhere ... there is a final solution.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #274062
#11. I have said that one of the distinguishing characteristics of a great man is that his active intervention makes what seemed highly improbable in fact happen.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #347452
#12. 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 unalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #382960
#13. Fontenelle was the most civilized man of his time, and indeed of most times.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #497861
#14. Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #536084
#15. There is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #551334
#16. Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #566886
#17. 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 they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #567653
#18. 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.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #672109
#19. To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #675696
#20. Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #715988
#21. Utopias have their value
nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities
but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #729343
#22. 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, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #759093
#23. Life may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #812568
#24. Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #839971
#25. All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #858501
#26. Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #912264
#27. Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #980396
#28. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #998176
#29. The desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, has been the markof high civilisation both on the part of individuals and communities.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1043827
#30. The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method ... was considerable and perhaps crucial.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1101609
#31. Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.

Corey Robin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1116316
#32. One must look at what impiety hates, what puts it in a rage, what it attacks always, everywhere, and with fury - that will be the truth.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1153363
#33. Philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization ... but if professors can truly wield this fatal power, may it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers can alone disarm them?

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1198570
#34. Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1224852
#35. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin sagely pointed out, liberty for wolves means death to lambs.124

Naomi Oreskes

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1248363
#36. The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1253896
#37. When one is engaged in a desperate defense of one's world and its values, nothing can be given away, any breach in the walls might be fatal, every point must be defended to the death.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1322913
#38. We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1332950
#39. He makes a vast contrast between nature, which is this elemental, capricious, perhaps causal, perhaps chance-directed entity, and man, who has morality, who distinguishes between desire and will, duty and interest, the right and the wrong, and acts accordingly, if need be against nature.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1363262
#40. Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1396359
#41. The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1504513
#42. The trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1567460
#43. True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1571495
#44. 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

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1631931
#45. The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage, and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1645661
#46. The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1684235
#47. To understand is to perceive patterns.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1686800
#48. The only thing which can be regarded as properly tragic is resistance, resistance on the part of a man to whatever it is that oppresses him.

Isaiah Berlin

Berlin Isaiah Quotes #1816998

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