Isaiah Berlin Quotes - Page 2

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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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• 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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• 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

  Wall, Defense, World

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

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• There is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Supposing That, Interesting, Reason

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

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• 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

  Isaiah Berlin (2013). “The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas”, p.15, Princeton University Press

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• 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

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

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• 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

  Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy (2001). “The Power of Ideas”, p.52, Princeton University Press

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• 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

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

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• 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

  Hate, Looks, Rage

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• 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, Guarantees That, Childhood

  Isaiah Berlin (2014). “Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought”, p.387, Princeton University Press

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

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• 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

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

  Isaiah Berlin

  Ideas, Way, Berlin

  Isaiah Berlin (2013). “Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder”, p.149, Princeton University Press

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• 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

  Isaiah Berlin (1978). “Karl Marx: His Life and Environment”, p.93, Oxford University Press

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• 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

  Objectivity, Law, History

  Isaiah Berlin (1959). “Historical inevitability”

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• 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

  Community, Desire, Individual

  1959 Four Essays on Liberty.

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• Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Liberty, Lambs

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

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