Isaiah Berlin Quotes

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

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

To understand is to perceive patterns.

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.

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

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.

The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and … all forms of rationalism … was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method … was considerable and perhaps crucial.

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.

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

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

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.

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