Isaiah Berlin quotes

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. (Isaiah Berlin)
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. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
To understand is to perceive patterns. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
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. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
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. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
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. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
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. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss. (Isaiah Berlin)
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. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
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 inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
The simple point which I am concerned to make is that where ultimate values are irreconcilable, clear-cut solutions cannot, in principle, be found. To decide rationally in such situations is to decide in the light of general ideals, the overall pattern of life pursued by a man or a group or a society. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
To confuse our own constructions and inventions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
When a man speaks of the need for realism one may be sure that this is always the prelude to some bloody deed. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
Historians of ideas, however scrupulous and minute they may feel it necessary to be, cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
This they do in the service of an imaginary science; and, like the astrologers and soothsayers whom they have succeeded, cast up their eyes to the clouds, and speak in immense, unsubstantiated images and similes, in deeply misleading metaphors and allegories, and make use of hypnotic formulae with little regard for experience, or rational argument, or tests of proven reliability. Thereby they throw dust in their own eyes as well as in ours, obstruct our vision of the real world, and further confuse an already sufficiently bewildered public about the relations of morality to politics, and about the nature and methods of the natural sciences and historical studies alike. (Isaiah Berlin)
By freedom he meant a condition in which men were not prevented from choosing both the object and the manner of their worship. For him only a society in which this condition was realised could be called fully human. Its realisation was an ideal which Mill regarded as more precious than life itself. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
The notion that one can discover large patterns or regularities in the procession of historical events is naturally attractive to those who are impressed by the success of the natural sciences in classifying, correlating, and above all predicting. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for tearing off hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too) but that when they assume that the two ideals are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as the existentialists call it, or of "false consciousness,” to use a Marxist formula) which their actual behavior exhibits. Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality-the hypocrisies of ordinary life-but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values. His own withers are unwrung. He has made his choice. He seems wholly unworried by, indeed scarcely aware of, parting company with traditional Western morality. View quote
Isaiah Berlin
While there may exist no more than the normal extent of disagreement about the meaning of particular terms or theses contained in these works, there is a startling degree of divergence about the central view, the basic political attitude of Machiavelli. View quote
Isaiah Berlin