Isaiah Berlin Quotes & Sayings

Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt. I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge, mercy and justice - all these are ultimate human values, sought for themselves alone; yet when they are incompatible, they cannot all be attained, choices must be made, sometimes tragic losses accepted in the pursuit of some preferred ultimate end. — Isaiah Berlin

Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations. — Isaiah Berlin

Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker. — Isaiah Berlin

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used - if necessary, terror, slaughter. — Isaiah Berlin

What is Life?
(1) Tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
(2) Dictionary definition in biology (chemical process within organic entities involving metabolism etc.)
(3) Mrs Woolf: 'Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.'
(4) Series of actual and hypothetical behavioural data which differ in certain assignable ways from data defining dead or inanimate entities.
(5) That which the Lord infused into Adam. See Genesis 1. 4 [sc. 2. 7].
Which?
Mental Cramp. — Isaiah Berlin

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. — Isaiah Berlin

Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep. — Isaiah Berlin

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs. — Isaiah Berlin

Herzen is terrified of the oppressors, but he is terrified of the liberators too. He is terrified of them because for him they are the secular heirs of the religious bigots of the ages of faith; because anybody who has a cut and dried scheme, a straitjacket which he wishes to impose on humanity as the sole possible remedy for all human ills, is ultimately bound to create a situation intolerable for free human beings, for men like himself who want to express themselves, who want to have some area in which to develop their own resources, and are prepared to respect the originality, the spontaneity, the natural impulse towards self-expression on the part of other human beings too. — Isaiah Berlin

The only thing which can be regarded as properly tragic is resistance, resistance on the part of a man to whatever it is that oppresses him. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

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

I wish my life and decisions to depend upon myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not other men's, acts of will. I wish to be the subject, not an object ... I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer - deciding, not being decided for, slef-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them. — Isaiah Berlin

The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced by choices equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably mean the sacrifice of others. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

To understand is to perceive patterns. — Isaiah Berlin

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

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. — Isaiah Berlin

Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be and do - and that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage, and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind. — 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. — Isaiah Berlin

The trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an unalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human. — Isaiah Berlin

True pluralism, as Berlin understands it, is much more tough-minded and intellectually bold: it rejects the view that all conflicts of values can be finally resolved by synthesis and that all desirable goals may be reconciled. It recognises that human nature generates values which, though equally sacred, equally ultimate, exclude one another, without there being any possibility of establishing an objective hierarchical relation among them. Moral conduct may therefore involve making agonising choices, without the help of universal criteria, between incompatible but equally desirable values. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

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

Utopias have their value
nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities
but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal. — Isaiah Berlin

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? — Isaiah Berlin

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

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

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

Fontenelle was the most civilized man of his time, and indeed of most times. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict - and of tragedy - can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it - as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right — Isaiah Berlin

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

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

The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism. — Isaiah Berlin

Romanticism embodied a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals. — Isaiah Berlin

[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. — Isaiah Berlin

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

The desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, has been the markof high civilisation both on the part of individuals and communities. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the alter of the great historical ideas - justice or progress or happiness of future generations ... or emancipation of a nation or race or class ... this is the belief that somewhere ... there is a final solution. — Isaiah Berlin

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

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. — Isaiah Berlin

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous: like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian. — Isaiah Berlin

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. — Isaiah Berlin

No perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure. — Isaiah Berlin