Quotes from 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.

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

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

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

Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.

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.

Life may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others.

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

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

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

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

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.

To understand is to perceive patterns.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.

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.

Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

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.

he makes a vast contrast between nature, which is this elemental, capricious, perhaps causal, perhaps chance-directed entity, and man, who has morality, who distinguishes between desire and will, duty and interest, the right and the wrong, and acts accordingly, if need be against nature.