Isaiah Berlin quotes
Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.
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.
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.
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.
Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.
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 first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
To understand is to perceive patterns.
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