Isaiah Berlin

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Men would no longer be victims of nature or of their own largely irrational societies: reason would triumph; universal harmonious cooperation, true history, would at last begin. For if this was not so, do the ideas of progress, of history, have any meaning? Is there not a movement, however tortuous, from ignorance to knowledge, from mythical thought and childish fantasies to perception of reality face to face, to knowledge of true goals, true values as well as truths of fact? Can history be a mere purposeless succession of events, caused by a mixture of material factors and the play of random selection, a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing? This was unthinkable. The day would dawn when men and women would take their lives in their own hands and not be self-seeking beings or the playthings of blind forces that they did not understand. It was, at the very least, not impossible to conceive that such an earthly paradise could be; and if conceivable we could, at any rate, try to march towards it. That has been at the centre of ethical thought from the Greeks to the Christian visionaries of the Middle Ages, from the Renaissance to progressive thought in the last century; and indeed, is believed by many to this day.”

“הוא היה יהודי ב"אול–סולס" הקולג' היוקרתי ביותר באוקספורד, ציוני בחברה שביקרה, ולעתים גם בזה ללאומיות, מבקר הנאורות במעוז הנאורות, רומנטיקן בעולם אמפיריציסטי, איש אשכולות חובב שיחה ודעת. ברלין נטל מכל אחד ממרכיבי זהותו עולם של ידע וערכים שהיו לאבני היסוד של הגותו.”

“אפשר שהלאומנות, בניגוד לתודעה לאומית גרידא – תחושת השייכות לאומה כלשהי – היא בראש ובראשונה תגובה על יחס מתנשא או מזלזל כלפי ערכיה המסורתיים של חברה, תוצאה של גאווה פגועה ותחושת השפלה השוררת בקרב בניה בעלי התודעה החברתית הגבוהה ביותר.”

“פילוסופים כמוהם כילדים הממשיכים לשאול שאלות ילדותיות.”

“רק הברברים אינם סקרנים לדעת מאין באו, כיצד הגיעו למקום שבו הם נמצאים ולאן הם הולכים.”

“ניתן למנוע עוול, דלות, עבדות ובערות באמצעות רפורמה או מהפכה. אך אנשים אינם חיים רק על מנת להיאבק ברוע, אלא מציבים לעצמם מטרות חיוביות, תהיינה אישיות או חברתיות.”

“חירותם של הזאבים משמעה מותם של הטלאים.”

“משמעותה היסודית של החירות היא להיות משוחררים מן הכבלים, ממאסר ומשעבוד לזולת.”

“הראשונים שבאנשים שאותם העריצים הורגים או מנסים להשתיק הם אלה שמוחותיהם חופשיים.”

“להבין פירושו להבחין בדפוסים.”

“To understand is to perceive patterns.”

“Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”