Quotes from Quentin Skinner

no such concepts can have definitions: they only have histories. But if they only have histories, then the only way to understand them is historically ? and that is what animates my work, the belief that if we are going to understand any of the concepts we use to organise our social, moral, and political world, we shall have to study them historically

Political life sets the main problems for the political theorist, causing a certain range of issues to appear problematic, and a corresponding range of questions to become the leading subjects of debate. This view does not entails that theoretical ideas are to be treated as a straightforward outcome of their social base, but are certainly to be read in terms of their wider intellectual context

the concepts of libertas and libertà came to be employed 'almost as technical terms of Florentine politics and diplomacy' in the course of the fourteenth century, and that they were almost invariably used in order to express the same ideas of independence and self-government

Özgürlüklerinin korunmas? için kral?n iyi niyetine güvenmek zorunda b?rak?ld?klar? ölçüde, özgür uyruklar olarak deÄŸil, tutsaklar olarak yaÅŸamaya mahkûm olacaklar...

The intellectual historian can help us to appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times between different possible worlds.