Isaiah Berlin famous quotes

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

#Freedom #Men #Essence

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

#Liberty #Sake #Ingredients

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

#Ignorance #Fighting #Men

To understand is to perceive patterns.
-- Isaiah Berlin

#Wisdom #Understanding #Patterns

Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.
-- Isaiah Berlin

#Freedom #Sheep

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.
-- Isaiah Berlin

#Men #Ideas #People

All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.
-- Isaiah Berlin

#Spring #Matter #Belief

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

#Horizon #Utopia #Guides

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

#Powerful #Rights #Goal

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

#Thought Provoking #Curiosity #Wish

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

#Ideas #Way #Resistance

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.
-- Isaiah Berlin

#Inspiration #Adults #Asking

True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are.
-- Isaiah Berlin

#True Knowledge

Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.
-- Isaiah Berlin

#Communication #Language #Exhausted

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

#Race #Class #Ideas

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

#Honesty #Hopeful #Intellectual

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

#Men #Desire #Habit

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

#Past #Childhood #Heaven

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

#Ignorance #Men #Patterns

If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict—and of tragedy—can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it—as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right
-- Isaiah Berlin

#Confused #Believe #Men

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

#War #Tyrants #Yesterday

We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.
-- Isaiah Berlin

#Loss #Choices #May

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

#Fundamentals #Metaphor #Chains

Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge, mercy and justice - all these are ultimate human values, sought for themselves alone; yet when they are incompatible, they cannot all be attained, choices must be made, sometimes tragic losses accepted in the pursuit of some preferred ultimate end.
-- Isaiah Berlin

#Loss #Justice #Choices

The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.
-- Isaiah Berlin

#Loss #Perfect #Choices

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

#Law #Assumption #Human Nature

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

#Law #Objectivity #History

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

#Art #Morality #Consciousness

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.
-- Isaiah Berlin

#Liberty #Lambs

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

#Men #Cynical #May

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

#Life #Opaque #May

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made
-- Isaiah Berlin

#Humanity #Made #Timber