Isaiah Berlin Quotes (15 Quotes)


    Churchill for all his love of the present hour, his unquenchable appetite for new knowledge, his sense of the technological possibilities of our time, and the restless roaming of his fancy in considering how they might be most imaginatively applied, despite his enthusiasm for Basic English, or the siren suit which so upset his hosts in Moscow - despite all this, Churchill remains a European of the nineteenth century.

    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.

    Ideally, what we are calling for is a relationship of good neighbors, but given the number of bigoted terrorist chauvinists on both sides, this is impracticable. The solution must lie somewhat along the lines of reluctant toleration,

    There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision... and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory... The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.

    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 simple point which I am concerned to make is that where ultimate values are irreconcilable, clear-cut solutions cannot, in principle, be found. To decide rationally in such situations is to decide in the light of general ideals, the overall pattern of life pursued by a man or a group or a society.


    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.

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

    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.

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

    Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.

    For all his sense of history, his large, untroubled, easy-going style of life, his unshakable feeling of personal security, his natural assumption of being at home in the great world far beyond the confines of his own country, Roosevelt was a typical child of the twentieth century and of the New World.


    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.


    More Isaiah Berlin Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Liberty & Freedom - Life - Imagination & Visualization - Slavery - Security - Ideal - Principle - Heaven - Philosophy - Countries - Metaphor & Analogy - World - Society & Civilization - Sense & Perception - Ignorance - Relationship - History - Poverty - View All Isaiah Berlin Quotations

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