Isaiah Berlin Quotes

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All quotes by Isaiah Berlin: Belief Choices Desire Goals Justice Liberty Loss Values more...
  • Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

    Liberty   Lambs  
    Isaiah Berlin (2013). “The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas”, p.13, Princeton University Press
  • 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.

    Loss   Justice   Choices  
    Isaiah Berlin (2013). “The Power of Ideas”, p.27, Princeton University Press
  • To understand is to perceive patterns.

    Isaiah Berlin (1959). “Historical Inevitability”
  • 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 (2014). “Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought”, p.387, Princeton University Press
  • Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.

    Isaiah Berlin (1993). “The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History”, Ivan R. Dee Publisher
  • 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.

    "Liberty" by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, (Introduction), 2002.
  • 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.

    Wall   Defense   World  
    Isaiah Berlin (2013). “The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas”, p.161, Princeton University Press
  • 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.

    Men   Desire   Habit  
    Isaiah Berlin (1978). “Karl Marx: His Life and Environment”, p.93, Oxford University Press
  • We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.

    Loss   Choices   May  
    Henry Hardy, Isaiah Berlin (2016). “The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism”, p.11, Brookings Institution Press
  • Life may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others.

    Life   Opaque   May  
    Isaiah Berlin (2014). “Personal Impressions: Third Edition”, p.5, Princeton University Press
  • 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.

    Confused   Believe   Men  
    "Liberty" by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, ("Two Concepts of Liberty"), 2002.
  • True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are.

  • I wish my life and decisions to depend upon myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not other men's, acts of will. I wish to be the subject, not an object...I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer - deciding, not being decided for, slef-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them.

    Men   Animal   Goal  
  • 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.

    Powerful   Rights   Goal  
    Isaiah Berlin (1991). “The crooked timber of humanity: chapters in the history of ideas”, Random House Inc
  • The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

    Men   Ideas   People  
  • 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 (1959). “Historical inevitability”
  • There is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.

    Isaiah Berlin (1991). “The crooked timber of humanity: chapters in the history of ideas”, Random House Inc
  • 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 (2013). “Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder”, p.320, Princeton University Press
  • 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 (2013). “The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas”, p.71, Princeton University Press
  • Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.

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

    Ideas   Way   Berlin  
    Isaiah Berlin (2013). “Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder”, p.149, Princeton University Press
  • 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 (2013). “The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas”, p.2, Princeton University Press
  • Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.

    Freedom   Sheep  
  • 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.

    Hate   Looks   Rage  
  • All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.

    Spring   Matter   Berlin  
  • 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.

    Race   Class   Ideas  
  • When a man speaks of the need for realism one may be sure that this is always the prelude to some bloody deed.

    Men   Cynical   Needs  
  • Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made

    Humanity   Made   Timber  
  • Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.

    "The Listener" Magazine, 1978.
  • 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, Henry Hardy (2001). “The Power of Ideas”, p.52, Princeton University Press
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 42 quotes from the Philosopher Isaiah Berlin, starting from June 6, 1909! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Isaiah Berlin quotes about: Belief Choices Desire Goals Justice Liberty Loss Values