Isaiah Berlin Quotes

Quotes about:

• True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are.

  Isaiah Berlin

  True Knowledge

  33 Copy quote

• Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Freedom, Sheep

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• 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

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• Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be and do - and that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Mad, Wicked, Church

  "Unreasonable behaviour" by David Beresford, www.theguardian.com. September 17, 2007.

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• 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.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Liberty, Berlin, Ingredients

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

  55 Copy quote

• Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Fairness And Equality, Justice, Liberty

  'Two Concepts of Liberty' (1958) p. 10

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• To understand is to perceive patterns.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Wisdom, Understanding, Patterns

  Isaiah Berlin (1959). “Historical Inevitability”

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• 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

  Isaiah Berlin (1991). “The crooked timber of humanity: chapters in the history of ideas”, Random House Inc

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• The trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Ideas, Interesting, Care

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• 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

  'Four Essays on Liberty' (1969) 'Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century'

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• The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Men, Ideas, People

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• 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

  Isaiah Berlin (2013). “The Power of Ideas”, p.27, Princeton University Press

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• Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Inspiration, Adults, Asking

  "The Listener" Magazine, 1978.

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• 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

  Religious, Thought Provoking, Curiosity

  Isaiah Berlin (2013). “The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas”, p.2, Princeton University Press

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

  Isaiah Berlin

  Humanity, Made, Timber

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• We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Loss, Choices, May

  Henry Hardy, Isaiah Berlin (2016). “The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism”, p.11, Brookings Institution Press

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• 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

  "Liberty" by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, ("Two Concepts of Liberty"), 2002.

  26 Copy quote

• 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

  Isaiah Berlin (2012). “The Proper Study Of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays”, p.11, Random House

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• 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

  Practice, Perfect, Suffering

  1978 The Crooked Timber of Humanity,'The Decline of Utopian Ideals in the West'.

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• 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, Needs

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• 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, Denial

  "Two Concepts of Liberty". Book by Isaiah Berlin, 1958.

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

  Isaiah Berlin

  Spring, Matter, Berlin

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• 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.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Men, Animal, Goal

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• 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

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• 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

  Isaiah Berlin (2013). “The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas”, p.71, Princeton University Press

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