Quotes from Isaiah Berlin

we never shall discover all the causal chains that operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small; historians select an absurdly small portion of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny section.

For Rousseau), the ancient conflict (between liberty and authority) is to be resolved by breeding a race of men who will choose absolutely freely only that which is absolutely right.... there would be no conflict, no agony, no choice.

History, only history, only the sum of the concrete events in time and space – the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment – this alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers – answers needing for their apprehension no special sense or faculties which normal human beings did not possess – might be constructed.

La fede assoluta in soluzioni razionali e la proliferazione della letteratura utopistica sono due aspetti di stadi consimili dello sviluppo culturale, nell'Atene classica come nel Rinascimento italiano, nel settecento francese come nei due secoli successivi, e non meno oggi che nel passato recente o remoto.

Noi chiamiamo grandi storici solo quelli che non soltanto hanno il pieno controllo della documentazione fattuale ottenuta mediante l'impiego dei migliori metodi critici disponibili, ma possiedono altresì la profonda penetrazione immaginativa che caratterizza i romanzieri di talento. Dopo tutto - lo ricordava molto tempo fa lo storico inglese G.M. Trevelyan - Clio era una musa.

Possiamo fare solo quello che possiamo; ma questo dobbiamo farlo, nonostante le difficoltà.

In the realm of political action, laws are few and far indeed: skills are everything.

Tú puedes creer que eres libre, tú puedes creer que eres feliz, tú puedes creer que deseas esto o aquello, pero yo sé mejor lo que eres, lo que deseas, lo que te libera

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

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

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.

To understand is to perceive patterns.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

People] cannot live without seeking to describe and explain the universe to themselves. The models they use in doing this must deeply affect their lives, not least when they are unconscious; much of [their] misery and frustration…is due to the mechanical and unconscious, as well as deliberate, application of models where they do not work…The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist [people] to understand themselves and thus operate in the open and not wildly, in the dark.

I can see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.

I have said that one of the distinguishing characteristics of a great man is that his active intervention makes what seemed highly improbable in fact happen.

The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folks uncorrupted by civilisation---this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought, which stems from Plato and his disciples.

philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization....but if professors can truly wield this fatal power, may it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers can alone disarm them?